


Neverland

by GreenEyedDevil



Series: Neverland [2]
Category: Justified
Genre: Abduction, Alcohol Abuse, Angst, Commune, Cult, Militia, Multi, Nightmares, PTSD, Self Destructive Behaviour, Sleepwalking, Trauma, Violence, abducted children, illegal adoption, m/m - Freeform, missing kids
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-07
Updated: 2017-01-26
Packaged: 2018-05-31 21:32:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 26
Words: 26,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6488167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GreenEyedDevil/pseuds/GreenEyedDevil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tim tried to pretend he didn't care who he was, but he did. Rachel tried to keep her promise not to find out, but she didn't.<br/>Months after the events of Texas, Tim and Raylan are trying to move on, with varying success. When Tim's behaviour becomes a problem Rachel decides to track down his true identity, in the hopes that with answers, he'll finally find closure. But as the old saying goes, 'be careful what you wish for...'</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_The pathway through the woods was marked by lights, paper lanterns hanging from tree limbs in a chain that lit the way._

_Behind him the path was far darker than it should be, the shadows thick and pooled and to Tim’s eyes, predatory. He moved away, towards the light._

_Ahead he could see the carnival. He could see the throbbing glow cast up by the rides and the stringed lamps lighting the throughway and the stalls. He heard voices, delighted screams and shrieks and vendors calls to ‘roll up roll up’ and win prizes, cheap stuffed bears and goldfish destined to die within days and he heard the rumble and rush of a roller coaster rattling the tracks, the clatter clack of the Ghost Train doors slamming open and closed, swallowing and disgorging the brave and the terrified._

_He knew his grandparents were waiting. And Lucy. Lucy was waiting to ask for his pocket money and call him the wrong name. Twice._

_Her boyfriend would give him some beer and a little weed and Tim would ride the roller coaster and get sick as soon as he got off._

_Later he would ride the swing ride. It would lift him high up above the carnival, above his drunk mother and grandparents and the memory of the violent Henry back home and the anger and the frustration, and the lights of the carnival would become a rainbow blur and Tim would feel the cool was of the air on his face he would spread his arms wide and for a moment he would fly…_

_This wasn't the right forest, Tim knew, not for this memory._

_These trees were wrong, too dark and old, gnarled and twisted._

_This wasn't from the memory._

_Tim was dreaming._

_The idea left him as quickly as it came to him, swallowed up by that strange part of the dreaming mind that lets you acknowledge it so briefly so long as you carry on having it._

_Ahead of him the carnival was changed, closed now, dark and empty and silent and Tim was hesitant to approach. It wasn't safe any more._

_But when he turned and looked back the paper lanterns behind him were falling dark, one by one by one and Tim ran. Something was behind him._

_The growing dark, the shadow, nipped at his heels and Tim ran from it. He was younger now and smaller and in a much denser forest and something scary was behind him and he could hear it calling to him, calling his name but it didn’t say ‘Tim’, it was something else, the word that came, and then something leapt out of the dark and grabbed him._


	2. Chapter 2

Cold like this, it bothered most people. It was the bone deep kind that came along with the lingering winter and several feet of deep snow, the kind of cold that turned the air to ice that glimmered and shone.

But Tim tuned it out and stared down his scope. He had learned to ignore the cold and the ache in his muscles and limbs, to keep his body still and calm so the shivering that wanted to overwhelm him, didn’t ruin his shot. He had learned to tune out the tired as well, the fatigue built up over three nights of nightmares and little to no sleep. That was how they cycled, three nights on and then a kind of mental exhaustion would force him into a deep and restorative sleep and he might get a few days reprieve before it started again. He was used to the cycle. This one would pass, in time. He kept telling himself that. Kept waiting for it to happen.

 He exhaled and the breath clouded around his head and for a moment was warm and but it quickly cooled and chilled his skin.

Through his scope he saw Raylan Givens standing behind an open car door, talking calmly into a phone, staring hard at the window of the house they were parked in front of, as if he could see the man inside, the man on the other end of his call. Tim’s cross hairs were fixed on the window. The house and lawn were covered in thick snow but today they flashed blue and red under the emergency lights.

++

“Now, Jerome,” Raylan said and tried not to sound as frustrated as he felt, tried to think of the family in whose home the fugitive Jerome Reeves had taken up in after he ran from the Marshals finally closing in , pictured the glimpses of their faces he had seen, their fear. The cold was biting into him and he was shivering with nearly  “Are you sure we can’t get you somethin’ to eat?” Raylan had a headache. Maybe it was the long day or hours spent standing in the cold, or maybe it was the cacophony of the car engines and crackling, whistling police radios and the constant hum and hubbub created by dozens of people trying to be quiet while still trying to be useful.

Or maybe it was the ballad of Jerome Reeves.

Long before he shot a home help nurse to death, ran off and took refuge in the house of innocent stranger he now held at gun point, Jerome Reeves had been in deep shit.

 He had beaten a guy up outside a bar, Jerome’s normal Friday night, only this time he had left pieces of the poor bastards skull on the asphalt of the parking lot. His victim had spent the last eighteen months relearning how to speak. Jerome had been in hiding and smoking crack nearly every day. Now Jerome had gone and killed somebody.

“I don’t want nothin’,” Jerome was snapping into the phone. “I want you people to fuck off!”

++

Tim had a headache, the cold air freezing his sinuses, his skull. Enough new snow had fallen on him and melted to soak his canvas cap, his hair and clothes. He hurt, ached all over and he wanted this situation to end, wanted the endangered family to be free and safe, wanted the bad guy to be dealt with. Whether the gunman surrendered or got shot Tim just wanted to go home.

He heard wings flutter behind him as a crow cawed irritably at the cold, the call a stark interruption to the calm hushed silence Tim had found on his rooftop. The flurry triggered a quiet rush of what Tim recognised as the sound of snow falling from branch to branch, hitting the rooftop near Tim with a soft ‘whumph’. He felt the snow land on his legs, heard it rasp off his combats. Through his scope he could see snowflakes falling around Raylan. The snow storm was back.

++

Raylan pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers and tried to massage away his head ache and wondered idly if anyone of the gathered cops and paramedics had any aspirin he could chew.

“I want to leave as well, Jerome, believe you me,” he was saying in response to another whined request that Raylan ‘fuck off and git on out of here’, tried to keep the fatigue he felt out of his voice. Jerome fell silent, stewing and sulking.

Raylan glanced around the controlled chaos surrounding him, wished he was still alone. He felt the pressure more than he liked with an audience that rivalled the super bowl, knew he was being watched extra closely. The last time he got a lot of attention was Texas and ever since people had expected him to crack in some way. He wouldn’t, or didn’t plan to, but they watched and waited regardless.

It had been just Raylan and Tim for a while, when the first call came in that Jerome had finally decided he was safe enough after a year and a half of hiding, and had unwisely ventured to a liquor store and was ID’d by a clerk within minutes. The clerk and owner of the store had gone to school with Jerome and the man Jerome had left with brain damage. He hadn’t been overly fond of either of them, but he was a lot less fond of Jerome once word had gotten around what he had done.

He had described Jerome’s behaviour as off, erratic, more than a little wired up and manic. He had gone so far as to call Jerome paranoid.. That hadn’t been the half of it. The second he had spotted the Marshals approaching, recognising Tim from a previous arrest, Jerome had started shooting at them, clearing half a clip before he decided to run. He’d never had a gun before, but he sure did now.

Whatever manic state he had entered was potent and lasting and showed no sign of abating. He’d shot and killed an innocent man, the home help nurse, walking past their car at the most tragic moment, and now he had hostages.

It had been too much for two Marshals.

Now Raylan was joined by the whole damn circus. What looked like ever cop car in the city, two ambulances, a press truck and for some reason an ice cream van had already rolled around. Eventually four different officials in suits trying to take over and direct things had materialised and descended almost at once into petty arguments about who would run the show. They all missed the fact the guy running the show was the tactical leader, and that guy had made the call that Tim and his rifle would decide how this went down.

“Why are you still out there?” Jerome was asking.

“I don’t want to be. None of us want to be,” Raylan said. “We all want to go home.”

“So leave already!” Jerome snarled and behind the mans voice Raylan heard the whimpers of his hostages, a family of three who had been enjoying a late afternoon supper when the high and mentally disturbed Jerome arrived and he shared a look with the tactical operations leader, a weighted look that held a question and an answer for them both as Jerome’s voice sounded again, “Just leave!”

++

Tim’s arm hurt.

The cast was off and he only had to wear a foam wrist support but the cold bit into the newly stitched bones like a bear trap, ever closing, ever grinding, especially since he’d spent his day laying in the snow.

He could tune it out but it didn’t go away entirely and he’d only have to deal with it later, when he didn’t have anything to focus on. He hated the broken arm. It reminded him of Texas, which reminded him of what happened after Texas. He preferred to avoid thinking of that but the arm wouldn’t let him stop.

Nothing touched the pain, nothing he could take anyway. He might be able to drink enough that he would fall dead asleep but the balance was tricky. He might fall dead asleep. Or he might have nightmares.

He inhaled, slowly exhaled, flexed his grip on the trigger and waited.

++

“We can’t do that,” Raylan said calmly.  “We can’t just leave. Let me know what else I can do to help you?”

“Fuck. _OFF_ ,” Jerome snapped and Raylan heard the hostages again, their fear in soft words, sobs.

“What I can do is get the DA. He’s a friend of mine and if I tell him some of what you told me, he can work you out a deal,” it was a lie. Jerome had escalated from near fatal assault to outright murder while evading arrest. He was fucked. But Raylan didn’t need to tell him that. A smarter man, Raylan wouldn’t bother to lie to. But Jerome wasn’t so smart.

“I don’t want no fuckin’ deal, I want you to fuck off so I can think!” Jerome yelled, his voice growing louder with each exclamation.

“Just think about the DA comin’ down,” Raylan started to say.

“Stop telling me what _to do!_ ” Jerome’s voice rose sharply and suddenly to a bellow and Raylan pulled the phone away from his ear and he heard a gunshot and that picture window shattered outwards. The door of the house opened and Jerome emerged arm raised and gun pointed and he ran forwards and then with a suddenness and no warning his head snapped back in a cloud of red mist and brain matter. His momentum flung his legs forwards even as his head slammed backwards and his body slumped to the ground.

The shot followed seconds later, a splitting crack that rolled across the frozen landscape like a wave.

++

Tim waited patiently, watching through his scope as someone rushed towards the lump that Tim had turned from a person to a body. It was Raylan, long legs covering the space quickly. Raylan took the gun Jerome had been waving around, checked quickly for a pulse and found none, Tim knew without needing to be told. He rushed into the house and seconds later an elderly couple and their granddaughter fled the property and rushed to waiting officers.

There was a moment of silence that stretched long and tense before Raylan emerged from the home and raised his hand to his ear. His voice called across the radios, into Tim’s ear piece; ‘clear’.

Tim looked up from his scope and the chaotic world he had been observing shrank back down and became a far and distant thing. He remained mentally in that place, the quiet place he lived when he had to kill someone, where he could remain apart from the world until he was ready and he liked it there, lingered there while he began to pack up his rifle. His work was done.


	3. Chapter 3

Jerome Reeves wife was screaming. Tim was trying to pretend he couldn’t hear her but he could. They had been called down to the scene, his wife and kids, hoping there might come a chance when they could talk to him, coax him out of the house safely, but the moment had never come. Instead, Mrs Reeves and her children had sat in a car in full view of the home and had watched Jerome’s death as it played out. After he was shot someone had tried to move them out of the view of press and onlookers and had ferried them around a quiet corner somewhere. It had been a mistake, the match to the tinder, her already unstable emotions spilling out and over. Two uniformed officers stood haplessly by, waiting on someone with the right training to arrive to help the grief stricken woman as her emotions overtook her.

While their mother screamed, the children were silent. The eldest was a boy who favoured his father, had his bulk and height but had the eyes and face of a twelve year old. He stared silent and shaking with rage at anyone who met his eyes. Trying to comfort their mom was a girl of maybe ten. She had eyes filled with tears which never fell while she tried to pick their mother up off the floor. Mrs Reeves grief was palpable and the air around her radiated with it.

Tim couldn’t leave. Well no, that wasn’t true. Tim could just go and find Raylan, walk away from the grieving. But he didn’t. He was glued in place, watching this horrible flower unfold.

The boy was looking around and his eyes landed on Tim. Nothing in Tim’s appearance gave it away, that he was the rifleman, the sharpshooter who had slain the kids dad. Tim looked like any other cop in his black combats and jacket and his military boots stamping down the flattened snow and his rifle was long since packed away. Even if it wasn’t, he had no shame over what he’d done. He didn’t relish taking a father away from his family but Jerome had been, amongst other things, a murderer. Tim stared back and did not blink. On some level, he knew he should. The snow was falling around them and muting the sounds of the world, of anything beyond their little bubble. The boys eyes burned through the heavy falling flakes, his breath clouding, slow and steady, like his heart rate wasn’t even up.

“Hey,” he heard Raylan call and turned to see the older man frowning at the scene, at Tim sat hunched against the cold and Mrs Reeves screaming, eyes locked on her son.

Tim blinked at him. He hadn’t heard or detect him approach and normally his radar for Raylan was turned up to eleven.

Raylan was watching with that look Tim had grown to hate long ago and moreso since Texas, since the revelations that came after. It was a mixture of sympathy and concern, worry for Tim, but alongside it worry for something else. Worry for what Tim was capable of. Raylan’s eyes lingered on Tim but they slipped to the wretched Mrs Reeves, the older man equally disturbed by her distress. He looked back to Tim and after a moment, he spoke.

 “Let me drive you home.”


	4. Chapter 4

The car was dangerously comfortable, the heating blowing strong and the radio tuned down to a faint enough murmur to compliment the rush of the tyres over the increasingly snowbound roads. Raylan found concentrating on the drive kept his mind sharp, kept him awake. If he didn’t know better he’d say his passenger, though, had been lulled to sleep.

But he knew better. For his slumped posture and heavy lidded eyes Tim was awake, watching every car and pedestrian they passed, watching for danger and for threats. It wasn’t that he didn’t turn off that radar for danger. He couldn’t.

Raylan chewed a lip. Tim wasn’t right. He wasn’t okay. He was quieter and more reserved and for him that was saying something. He’d lost weight he didn’t have to lose. It showed that he wasn’t sleeping. That was _really_ saying something.

“That back there,” Raylan said, thinking of the twisted face of Mrs Reeves and feeling a flush of anger, “someone should have been there,” he wasn’t sure how to frame his words, wasn’t sure where to place his anger and frustration. He’d gotten a look at Tim’s Bambi like stare, confronted with the grieving family, eyes wide around something eerily dull and emotionally fatigued. He’d seen how Tim jumped when Raylan called his name. It was worrying. It wasn’t okay. It wasn’t like Tim. “You didn’t need to see that.” He said. He realised to himself that he’d been rattled by the sight of Tim’s uncertainty. Tim wasn’t meant to be uncertain. Doubt was Raylan’s job.

“You don’t have to,” Tim spoke quietly, voice a low and quiet drawl but though brief his words carried a finality Raylan understood. He changed tac.

“You want to get a drink?” Raylan asked and to answer Tim watched the heavy snow that Raylan’s wipers were just barely keeping off the windscreen. “Or we could get take out. Go eat it back at your place.”

“Then we could watch a movie,” Tim started, his tone dry and mocking, “I’ll put on some popcorn, we can get on the couch and snuggle and watch ‘Steel Magnolias’. We can’t go all the way though, I’m not ready to give up my V card. But you can get under my bra if you get some wine in me and call me pretty.”

Raylan tried and failed to swallow a laugh at Tim’s droll joke. “You should have more respect for yourself, I should have to work hard to get under the bra. You’re the kind of girl who goes all the way for ‘I love you’. Sad. You got daddy issues. Shame about, you know, your face, or you’d have made a great pole dancer.”

Tim allowed a wry smile to creep across his features. “I gave it a try but they paid me to stop,” he joked and the men shared a laugh.

“I haven’t watched Steel Magnolias in years,” Raylan mused idly. “Winona cries if I even mention it.”

“It was my grandmas favourite film,” Tim smiled, a wry quirk of the lips. “She used to say if I let a girl know I’d seen it she’d marry me in a heartbeat.”

Raylan chuckled, nearly laughed out loud at the irony. “How does Charlie like it?” he asked, a friendly, pointed poke but Tim grinned at it, something like a real smile that even showed teeth and reached his eyes. Charlie was what Raylan’s Aunt might have called Tim’s ‘special friend’.

“Oh he’s a big fan. Sally Field is his hero. He’s got a signed poster from ‘Smokey And the Bandit’, he dragged me to ‘Lincoln’ about fourteen times. I try and tell him it’s sort of a cliché…” Tim trailed off as if he realised he’d gone too deep, shared too much. Raylan glanced over, saw that youthful face harden up again. “He’s out of town,” he said quietly and again, there was that finality.

Raylan decided to take a chance with the upturn in the atmosphere in the car. “Tim,” he rarely used the kids first name and they both knew it meant something when he did. “Can I embarrass you a moment?”

“Do you have to?” Tim asked lightly but his mood stayed up.

“I‘m worried about you. And if I spend some time with you, see you eat a full meal and we just…shoot the shit a little, maybe…I would worry less. And would tell other people to do the same and let you get on with your…process,” he spoke calmly, quietly, concentrating on the drive as the snow fell hard and thick, enough to start to be something of a problem.

Tim chewed his bottom lip and for a second he closed his eyes and it was like he was going somewhere else, somewhere inside his head. He opened them again and took a breath. His expression flickered, like he was fighting some anger, irritation they both knew was some level of irrational, something he wasn’t totally in control of. He took another breath and spoke.  “I appreciate it but I just want to get some sleep.”

Raylan tried not to suck his teeth, nodded, but knew better than to push it, knew the effort it had taken for Tim to reply so politely. “Alright. Just let me know when.”

Tim was quiet again, that flicker of a kind of anger washing over his face.  He closed his eyes for a second, opened them, turned his head away so Raylan couldn’t see his face. “Don’t,” he spoke quietly, softly, the gentlest Raylan had ever heard his voice. It was somewhere between a demand and a request and Raylan might be convinced to say he heard something plaintive in it, but maybe it was his imagination. Raylan wasn’t sure what to say, so he said nothing.

Tim watched out of the window until Raylan finally made it back to the tree line driveway that led to Tim’s house. Raylan pulled up, touched the brakes to bring the slow moving car to a stop on the street outside. Tim opened the door and started to slip out. “Not _my_ grandma,” he said quietly, an afterthought, as the cold air flooded the inside of the car. “It was _his_ grandma’s favourite film. Tim’s.”


	5. Chapter 5

Tim had to trudge through the snow to reach his front door, up his long and narrow driveway, ankle deep in cold white slush, heavy flakes falling atop his head, down into his collar, freezing his exposed neck.

Raylan watched him walk from the towncar, lingering until he knew the kid had stepped through the doorway, was home safe. It seemed the right thing I do.

Tim hunched his neck in, shoulders up, folded in against the cold, walked in the snow washed yellow by the old street light.

Tim was not Tim Gutterson.

He had not been born Tim Gutterson, had become him by accident, someone elses accident many years before. A boy had been left with Henry Gutterson and Henry had assumed it was his son, the one he hadn’t seen for three years, since the boy was a month old.

The boy had been raised from that day forwards as Timothy Jay Gutterson.

He was nobody, that boy, a hollow person with no history, no past. He had thirty years of memories he had stolen from someone else, thirty years of memories of a life he was planted in the middle of.

Who he was really, the name he had been given at birth was unknown.


	6. Chapter 6

Tim let the door close behind him and leant back against it and felt a wave of exhaustion hit him and nearly take him to his knees. He was so tired and so cold. The snow had stopped abruptly, though the sky suggested more of a lull than an ending of the newest snowfall and the world was left muted and quiet, insulated by the thick layers of powder.

His house was oppressively quiet and almost as cold as it was outside and when Tim opened his eyes he hated how dark it was, felt his skin twitch with an old fear he’d forgotten. He had been scared of the dark, he remembered. When he was very small and hadn’t yet figured out how afraid he should be of more tangible things, and people. He had been afraid of the dark and of bad things coming out of it to take him. Tim felt his heart pound in his chest and fill his head, felt his throat tighten as if an unseen hand closed around it. He stared into the dark which pooled and thickened and gained a weight and substance and Tim’s breathing began to race as if he’d been sprinting and the conviction, the certainty he was in danger gripped him. He remembered the dream from the night before, the darkness between the trees, pooled between the branches and hiding from the light cast by the lanterns and he felt small and very young.

A voice issued an order inside his head ‘ _run run run leave now run survive run’_ but he ignored it, steeled himself against it. His hand snaked out and found the light switch but he waited before he flicked it and he stared the darkness down and when his heart stopped pounding and his breathing calmed, only then he turned on the light.

His body shook with a directionless need, restless energy flooding his system. He’d made a show. for himself, for the imagined phantoms, of not being scared. But he was.


	7. Chapter 7

Raylan probably should have gone home, gotten ahead of any more snow that wanted to fall but if he did that, he wouldn’t have been able to go a bar and drink.

Besides, the snow had stopped and the clouds had parted and the night air was freezing cold, open to the heavens and space beyond. It was company weather, until the clouds came back.

Raylan parked up, turned up his collar and jogged across the parking lot, fixed his eyes on the amber orange glow of the lights through the window. When he opened the door he felt a wash of warm air and relished it. He stepped inside and pulled the door behind him to stop more heat from escaping, nodding to a barman who recognised him, started to pour a bourbon.

Raylan spotted Rachel, smiling as she talked to Nelson, waving Raylan over once she spotted him. Nelson said hello, then goodbye, begged off to go home and see his kids and Raylan took his place besides Rachel. The barman delivered his drink and Raylan toasted it against Rachels beer before his first sip.

“You had a day,” Rachel said as they set their drinks back on the bar top, “You alright?”

Raylan took off his white Stetson hat and set it down, ran his hand through his hair to shake it out. He needed a haircut, eventually. “I wasn’t, for about a half hour. I wanted him to come on out so I could put cuffs on him. Makes me feel like he got away with something. That kid he shot was twenty three.” Raylan felt a twist of anger, the anger he had seethed over for half an hour while men in suits took their time deciding he and Tim could leave, anger he’d nearly taken out all over one guys face. “What’d you do while the rest of us were working for a living?” he teased Rachel gently and she laughed him off.

“Oh the usual, slackin’ off and readin’ personal emails,” she said. “Played about a hundred rounds of solitare.”

“How was court?” Raylan recalled what her day had actually seen her doing and she shook her head, rolled her eyes.

“She’ll walk. Got her some lawyer who’s nothing more than a snake oil salesman, he just wears better suits but the jury loves him. Vasquez isn’t too worried about it. Figures with her MO she’ll be back in here in another month,” Rachel said. “Of course, that leaves us in the position of hoping that when she does come back, it’s not over her hurtin’ somebody.”

She had been bottling up her frustrations all day, Raylan could tell, so he settled in, let her vent about her case, a chronically neglectful mother, and joined in when the time felt right. Every Marshal had frustrations about the system they operated in. Raylan’s, most everyones pet peeve were the shady defence attorneys their perps always hired, fast talking con artists with a licence to practice law, no better than the thugs they represented. Incentivised by the money they had no problem at all knowing when they’d helped a rapist or a murderer walk free.

Venting done they ordered more drinks, let a pleasant silence lapse to move them along from their gripes and complaints. “Hows him?” Rachel asked and her funny turn of phrase mean Tim.

Raylan sighed, a long low exhalation. “I tried to get him to come out, tried to get him to invite me over.” He shrugged, indicated his surroundings, the failure they emphasised.

Rachel cursed. “How’d he take you asking?”

Raylan shook his head. “Not well. Not at all. You were right, though. Charlie’s out of town,” Raylan said and it was Rachel’s turn to sigh.

“I told you,” she said. “I can tell. Charlie keeps an eye on him.”

Raylan nodded, said nothing. He was uncomfortable with this. With caring so much. He did care, in his way, but to do so openly was new territory for him. But he was rattled by the subtle changes in Tim, by the quiet withdrawal from friends, from company. He was shutting himself off and away and it was scary. Raylan knew that Tim could smile while telling the kinds of war stories that put hairs on your chest, that made you check your privilege and rethink how hard you thought your life had been before. But his voice in that car. That plaintive request.

“You know what really sticks it in and breaks it off?” He asked, feeling angry, at Tim for being so decent Raylan actually began to give a shit about him, at the adults who were so terrible to a little kid all those years ago. He wished someone from the kids ‘adoptive’ family remained alive so he could go and yell at them.

Rachel turned to him, cocked her head to one side as a response.

“You ever go through that phase as a kid where you start to hate your family so much you tell yourself they’re not yours?” Raylan asked her.

Rachel, whose childhood had been no picnic, but a different kind of difficult to Raylan and Tim’s, gave a small nod but said nothing, waited again for him to continue.

 “When things got really bad with Arlo, sometimes, when I was little, it made more sense to me that a real dad wouldn’t treat his kid like this. I would tell myself he’s not my dad. I was lankier than he was at my age, I liked to read, didn’t know yet that he did. We look different, I didn’t look like him…I would convince myself there was some dude out there, some cowboy, some hero, who was my real father. Then I got older, and I realised how fucked up that would be.”

“Hows that?” Rachel asked.

“He’s…” Raylan faltered but they both knew ‘he’ meant Tim. “He’s had this family who acts like they don’t want him. Mom ignores him to drink and get high. Grandfolks, maybe meaning well, they trying to pass him off to that same mom. Dad who treats him like a punching bag or a target for beer bottles. But he survives that and then he finds out they weren’t his. He isn’t even their kid. The amount of shit he…and they’re not blood. I don’t know if I can explain myself,” Raylan admitted. He paused, took a breath, tried again. “I wished Arlo wasn’t my dad, until I realised that would mean some stranger was whippin’ my ass all the time. Some stranger puttin’ his hands on my mother. He,” and again they both knew he meant Tim, “gets that reality. In spades. Even though they didn’t know, they were garbage to this kid anyway.”

Rachel made a sound, a wry, understanding chuckle, “I get it. I think.” She glanced sideways at him. “You’re a little soft on him,” she said, a gentle teasing tone. “You might even like him.”

“Only slightly,” Raylan said quietly with. He stared into his drink and wished they hadn’t started talking about Tim.

Rachel nodded, drew shapes in condensation from her bottle on the bar top. “I…” she spoke, paused, tried again, like Raylan had. He turned to her, stared a question. “I might have information. That-I don’t know if it will _help_ him. But if he needs a real family to be angry at, I might be able to give him one.”


	8. Chapter 8

_He plunged deep into the icy water and it closed around him and tightened around his chest, squeezed his lungs._

_He was so small and so weak and he thrashed and kicked and he wanted to scream but he was underwater._

_To scream was to drown but he needed to cry out, he had to if he was to be saved, if his mommy was to find him and save him, but to scream was to drown. His chest burned and his muscles ached and burned and something cold wrapped around him and pulled him deeper._

_He screamed. To scream was to drown._

_He rose up gasping from the water and all around was trees and the thick carpet of fallen leaves, covering his feet, ticking his legs and he turned, looked for his mommy but he couldn’t see the house and couldn’t hear her singing. And then he turned and he saw her. He saw his mommy but she wasn’t. She sang too sometimes but it wasn’t the same. She motioned him over, called to him and held out her arms and he was cold and scared and he had been drowning and he turned and he couldn’t see the house._

_He cried then like a very little kid, but he was a very little kid. And the mommy came the one who was mommy but she wasn’t, and she picked him up and her arms were strong and her hair smelled like strawberries._

_She carried him but he was left behind. He was on the ground and she was walking away with her back to him so he couldn’t see her face and he chased her and he screamed._

_To scream was to drown. The waters closed around him and the cold thing wrapped him up and pulled him back down into the dark and the cold._


	9. Chapter 9

Tim was at the bottom of his garden, ankle deep in the icy slush of the little creek behind his house.

He stumbled backwards as his mind snapped to wakefulness and the pieces of a dream fluttered away to nothing, left him addled and confused. His numb foot caught on a root or a stone and he fell back, landed hard on ass in the snow, cold rushing through him, the sweatpants he slept in soaked through in an instant, but the snow was covering more roots and tangled branches and still unsteady on his feet, still confused and half asleep he slipped again and fell hard into the water, against the rocks at the bottom.

The water flowed up and over his face, a freezing shock but that wasn’t what made him jerk backwards so hard, bolting upright with no thought to how tangled he still was. He fell again, into the water, against the rocks, distantly registering pain and discomfort but ignoring it, focusing on one thing.

He had to get out of the water. His chest heaved as he clawed his way over the branches and rocks, through the snow that gave way to soft mud beneath, too wet, too close to the creak for Tim’s need to get away to let him stop.

His legs were cold and getting colder, turning numb, getting harder to move but Tim gritted his teeth and pushed himself and he found some last faint burst of adrenaline and he got up, followed his own trail back through the snow.

A thought crept in that he could die. He was in bed clothes, soaking wet ones, outside in the snow on a freezing night and his home looked very far away. He ignored it, stumbled back to the house, tuned out the thoughts. He took the silence from the night around him, filled his head with it, focussed on moving his legs, one after the other. He tuned out everything but that thought, so intensely that he jumped when his bare foot nudged something hard. His legs tried to give way but Tim pushed himself forwards, through the open patio door which he managed to close behind him before he slumped to the floor like a sack of rocks.

He was shaking. He was shaking so hard he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, his body cramping in on its self as the shivering threatened to tear him up. He knew he had to get out of the wet clothes, warm up, and do so quickly but the cold was shaking him to pieces. He took as deep a breath as he could manage and got to his feet, legs like lead, stumbled towards the bathroom and managed to get inside and crossed to the combined bath and shower and though his hands were starting to cramp he managed to turn the taps.

The water ran immediately, the air steaming around it and Tim finally let himself fall down, sat beside the bathtub and waited, started to think about his breathing, about trying to relax the muscles in his body. There was no way he could get under the water, not right now. Even knowing it would make it worse, would make his freezing skin swell, the idea of water running over his face made his chest tighten and his heart pound and brought images to his mind, of a dark room, a wet cloth glued to his face, filled his ears with cruel laughter inspired by his feeble struggles.

He couldn’t get under the water.

But no matter,  the bathroom wasn’t so big and the air around him began to warm quickly and fill with steam. Tim’s muscles loosened enough that he could pull his t-shirt over his head. It was wet, stuck to his skin and it took more effort than he liked but the shirt came off and the relief came quickly. He got out of his sweats next, slightly more easily but he was still freezing and he was still tired and wanted to sleep.

He had been sleep walking. Again.

It wasn’t the first time in his life. Wasn’t even the first time since Texas. He’d never gone so far as the end of his long garden before. But at least this time he hadn’t picked up a weapon.

He lay down on the soft bathroom mat and closed his eyes, waited for everything to stop hurting.


	10. Chapter 10

Rachel found him sitting on the back porch, on a chair he’d swept clean of snow and curled his slight frame entirely into. He’d called her just after alarm had gone off, asked for a ride since his car was still at the Courthouse from the previous day.

It had been dark when she left but the sky was lightening now, bleeding from black to blue with the faintest glow of pink edging over the horizon. There was a thin line of clouds and the air was crisp and smelled of oncoming snow.

Tim was showered and dressed in heavy canvas combats and a thick jacket, collar turned up against the cold and he had his morning coffee in a thermos, two mugs set out alongside in a space on a cleared table coated in snow.

“God, it’s pretty out here,” Rachel said as she sat in a second chair Tim had also readied for her. “That view.”

She spotted the line of disturbed snow running up the centre of his long lawn. “You running sprints out here?”

She turned, finally got a clear look at his face in the quickly brightening light and she heard herself gasp.

Bruises and grazes ran along his hairline, his jaw and his cheekbone like he’d fallen against something, but he smiled at her, almost apologetic. “Would you believe I slipped in the shower?” he asked her.

“No,” she said, “What the _hell_ happened?”

“It’s icy out,” Tim said, then he lied, to her face, “I had to chase off some cats,” he nodded towards the disrupted snow, “fightin’ or trying to get lucky.”

“Bullshit,” she shrugged, sat down and poured herself a coffee. “Bull. Shit.”

Tim said nothing and she blew on her coffee, took a sip and nearly forgave him for whatever he had done that had made her angry. Even she wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t just the lying. But the coffee was ridiculous. He had a skill. It was a secret even Raylan didn’t know. “What happened?”

“I fell,” Tim lied again, took a long drag on a cigarette.

“I thought you quit,” Rachel said.

“No you didn’t,” Tim told her and there was a _tone_ and she arched an eyebrow at him, making it clear she was in no kind of mood.

Rachel let a silence lapse, not sure she could speak without yelling, still not sure why she was angry with him, not sure it even was him she was angry at. Raylan had warned her off talking to Tim about what she’d learned, but here was the glaring evidence they had to do _something_. Tim was her best friend and he was drowning and she’d been warned off tossing him a life preserver.

“What happened?” she asked again when she could.

Tim was silent and she knew him better than to push him but she wanted to anyway.

“I stutter?” Tim asked lightly, dragged again on the cigarette and she nearly it snatched it out of his hand. There was that tone again, an edge that hadn’t existed between them since a few months after he arrived from Glynco, a newly minted Marshal, fifteen pounds underweight, chain smoking and drinking and calling it dinner. She’d let him ride for a few months since he was an outstanding Marshal regardless of evident personal issues but when he’d warmed up a little she’d spoken up.

He hadn’t liked it then, had argued back, claimed he was fine, all was good. He’d been defensive and she’d understood that, but when she’d earned trust and pushed the issue he’d admitted he didn’t remember the last time he slept all night.

She hadn’t spoken to him about it since. He had some _something_ , dealt with something in some way that saw him slowly gain weight, saw the haunted, hollow look bleed out of his eyes. A personality had emerged, a person who had been tucked in away behind all the damage, that hadn’t been able to meet everyone yet. Tim had emerged, not just the soldier but the person he’d been before the training and all the killing. He’d turned out to be a nerd. He’d begun smiling occasionally.

She turned to watch him finish his cigarette, finish his coffee, his eyes locked on the tall trees at the end of his garden, on the spoiled snow down by his creek and she saw the Tim that had taken such careful coaxing to emerge was falling back away. She opened her mouth, heard Raylan’s voice in her head warning her off, warning her not to tell Tim yet what she’d found, to give it ‘a minute’. One thing he’d said was ringing around her skull, stinging a little. Raylan hadn’t been unkind, but he’d pointed out that right now, for Tim, the things Rachel was learning about his background tended to have negative consequences. So it may be worth waiting and see if he even _wanted_ this information.

But how could she know without telling him she had it? She finished her own coffee and Tim stood, took their cups, the thermos and dropped them back inside. Rachel led the way back to her car while he locked up and she tried one last time.

“What happened to your face, Tim?” she asked him as they got in her car and she pretended not to notice he was moving stiff like he was hurt under his clothes.

She fired up her engine and Tim rolled down her window, leaned out to light up another cigarette. It had been a few minutes at best since his last one. He took a long drag and exhaled a long thin plume. “I told you. I fell.”


	11. Chapter 11

It hadn’t just been his face that got bruised up and when they figured it out, everyone started yelling.

Tim hadn’t seen the bruises until he stepped out of his shower earlier that morning, the hot water bringing the contusions to the surface and he’d cursed when he examined his torso in the mirror. It didn’t hurt too much, ached a little and was mostly stiff. Nothing was broken, much to his relief when he thought of what his freezing, shivering fit would have been like with some jagged bone edges floating around inside his chest. It looked like he’d been worked over.

 From the right side of his chest down to his hip was swirl and whorls of purple black bruises, dancing across the ribs even he had to admit were a little too prominent. He looked like some Instagram kids craft project, like food colouring swirled in paint and it was Raylan who got a look at it and he got worried and he told Art. Art called Tim to his office and like they had no other work to do that day Rachel and Raylan followed behind.

Tim sat in silence, mentally tuned out for a while and just listened, let them all yell at him, at each other when they got nothing from him. They all believed he was lying about how he got hurt, which was half true, but Raylan was yelling at Rachel over something not being her place, Rachel was yelling at Art about his allowing ‘this’ to continue and Art was trying to calm both of them down in between  It was an ugly blame game but it was also three people who were very fond of him expressing very real concern. He truly wished he could muster the effort to care. But he was so tired.

He’d missed something Raylan said and Rachel was yelling at him, motioning towards Tim without so much as looking at him, while Art tried without much success to calm them both down. Tim decided he’d had enough of being talked about, not too.

 “Is this what’s it’s like getting your parents called to the principals office?” Tim said and he let his voice carry in a way he’d learned in the military, designed to cut through anything, be heard in a warzone, his tone dry and droll and Rachel and Raylan both rounded on him. “I’m asking,” he held up his hands in a faux peace gesture. “I don’t actually know.”

No one smiled, no one laughed and Tim blew out a breath, felt that strange gaping fatigue that came when sleep had left him. It was physical and mental exhaustion, enough to slow his thinking and stumble him, leave him sluggish, but there was a burning behind his eyes, the wide awake he couldn’t get away from, that wouldn’t let him sleep.

“This isn’t funny,” Rachel started out in a yell but she caught herself, her tone dropping to something softer and more gentle. “This isn’t funny.” She turned away from him, one hand on her hip, the other rubbing at her forehead, frustrated, stressed.

“Feels kind of like a joke,” Tim said quietly, almost under his breath. He pushed himself forwards, to stand, wanting to get back to his desk and do some work.

“We’re not done,” Art said firmly, almost a snapped order and Tim raised an eyebrow at him, felt his own anger stir. He stood upright, slowly, stiff, muscles tightening as something flashed in his gut.

“I do something wrong, sir?” he asked and the use of the title was pointed and they all knew it. Art stood firm, stared at Tim like he might try and not blink. Like he had a chance. Tim waited, could be here all day.

“No,” Art said and Tim began to turn away.

“He’s not leaving,” Rachel said and Tim ignored her, walked for the door. “I have to tell him.”

“Rachel,” Raylan warned and Tim hated, loathed the fact his legs stopped walking and his ears pricked up.

“Tell me what?” he asked quietly. He knew the answer. It was in his voice already, the anger Art had ignited already boiling over. He had asked her not to.

“I’m sorry,” Rachel said and he watched her, her eyes meeting his, apologetic even as she spoke on. “I...think I found you.”

There was a silence someone expected him to fill with yelling. He didn’t like yelling, not if he could avoid it. Yelling drew attention which went against his instincts. And it reminded him of Henry. He didn’t like thinking of Henry.

But they were waiting and he wasn’t sure what he was meant to do. The anger burned through him like a live current and he could hear a calm voice pointing out how much better he would feel if he trashed Art’s desk or hit a wall. But he didn’t want that. He didn’t want any of this.

He turned and with no one protesting he walked from the room.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for some unpleasant language from our favourite Harlan crime lord.

Boyd Crowder had been a runt to a family of feral dogs, that was no secret. Until he learned to fight, got big enough to do it effectively, his survival had depended on his ability to see the storm approaching, the read the mood, detect the tension growing as his father’s temper turned sour.

Right just this second, his radar for tension was off the charts.

The Marshal, the baby one who had been a Ranger, starting young enough he probably still had braces, he’d been adventuring. He had bruises decorating his jaw and half hidden under his hair, like he’d been hit good and hard and he looked like he was a week removed from anything like a good nights sleep and he was pale enough to be transparent. He stared at the desk top somewhere just in front of Boyd like he would burn a hole in it but his eyes were miles away. Something was very, badly wrong with him.

And for whatever reason, that bothered Raylan Givens. The mans discomfort and frustration came off him in waves and when Boyd had arrived he’d seen the other Marshal, Brookes, sitting at her desk, staring at her screen without really seeing much of anything. The air smelled like an argument.

He was supposed to be talking about an old friend of his he hadn’t seen in seven years. Boyd had assumed Winston was dead, if he’d thought about him at all, but apparently he’d been spotted so Boyd was roused before dawn and dragged up to Lexington in the bitter cold early morning to ‘help with enquiries’. He knew what it was, a yank of the chain, a reminder of his place, only this time it was turning out to be worth it, for him. Something was amiss and Boyd had an axe to grind.

Gutterson hadn’t said a word so far and Raylan was doing all the talking and Boyd was having fun, killing time talking him in circles, laying on enough platitudes and big words to effectively say nothing and sound like he was answering questions on the purpose of being but Raylan hadn’t noticed yet. He kept shooting annoyed or worried glances at the marked up Ranger, occasionally trying to pass the conversational buck over. But Gutterson wasn’t going for it. What ever Raylan tried, Gutterson would give just enough of an answer to be doing his but would keep it closed, ensure he wouldn’t have to contribute beyond a few words each time.

Boyd had known snipers in the Gulf, knew a few now and he and Raylan both knew if the kid didn’t want to speak he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t move either, or blink, or even visibly breath. He’d be invisible if everyone looked away long enough.

But Boyd wasn’t going to look away and if the boy was _this_ messed up, Boyd wanted to enjoy it. Some time ago, Gutterson had killed Boyd’s friend. Boyd fully intended to make his feelings known. Across the sharpshooters face, one day, but for now, head games would do. Boyd had heard something about Gutterson, from a friend in Lexington and he’d been waiting for the moment to use it. This was that day.

“Crowder,” Raylan was saying but Boyd had checked his watch, figured if he pushed the right buttons now he could be back at his bar in Harlan in time for the rush. He fixed his eye on Gutterson and smiled.

“What happened to your face, Marshal? That big, strong island boy slap you around some? What’d you do, burn the spam?” Boyd asked Gutterson pointedly and when the kid didn’t move Boyd briefly wondered how far inside his own head Gutterson had gone.

But he was there. Gutterson had been still before but Boyd actually felt the air in the room change, felt something fall over them that old him he’d struck a nerve. Briefly, fleetingly, he wondered if he’d chosen the wrong day.

Those cold grey eyes tracked up and locked onto Boyd like a laser as an _expression_ crossed Guttersons face, something high and above and far beyond anger and Boyd felt a trill of something like fear and he liked it. Not many people scared him, but this kid did.

Boyd pressed on, “they’re like that, you know. Just a more savage people,” he purred. “And that big half breed…you’re lucky you didn’t get killed by that queer island ni-”

Gutterson moved but Raylan jerked left and almost shoved the kid out of his seat, forcing Gutterson to stand or be knocked down.

Raylan spilled out of his chair after him and pushed the younger Marshal back towards the wall, struggling to keep him in place, to restrain him. Gutterson was cursing a storm, a low quiet rush of threats, promises of violence.

“I say somethin’?” Boyd asked mildly and Gutterson tried to shove Raylan aside once again. The taller man was struggling but his reach gave him just enough of an advantage to keep Gutterson from doing something career destroying to Boyd, but just barely. Boyd could see the kids mind working, see the flash of anger being pushed aside by the soldier instinct which would direct him around Raylan and towards Boyd, at great cost to them both.

The door to the conference room opened and their Chief, Mullen, blew in like a whirlwind, cutting in front Raylan and sweeping up the youngest Marshal without pausing, his hand closing around the younger mans upper arm. The door connecting the conference room to the older mans office was opened and Gutterson was bundled in, his voice rising as he was pushed through the door, the threats distinct, graphic and creative in all the wrong ways. Boyd blinked. He’d expected a reaction but that had been gold. He turned to speak to Raylan but the taller man had somehow gotten around the desk and snatched Boyd’s arm up in one hand, hustled him towards the door so aggressively Boyd was half lifted off his feet.

“Now there’s no need to be rude!” Boyd said to Raylan, stumbling so he didn’t fall down.

Raylan glared daggers at Boyd, “Gimme one reason not to let him back in here to fuck you up?”

“I was concerned,” Boyd purred, both of them glancing towards the door at the sound of a thud, something being thrown ,“He’s normally got a thicker skin than that.”

“Get your shit and leave,” Raylan snarled. “Find your own way back to Harlan.”

Boyd smirked at him. “Tell him I said bye.”


	13. Chapter 13

It had snowed again before night fell but once it did, the skies cleared and a fat yellow moon had risen and now everything glowed. The sky was dark and black out here, glittering with stars and distant planets and Tim thought he that if the snow was done falling but not ready to melt he might take a hike the next day.

He thought about getting a dog, something to make the house livelier at night when he got home. He’d never minded it being cold and silent before but he did now. He missed Charlie, thought about calling him but it felt pointless. Charlie couldn’t come back yet and talking to him would make it worse.

Art had sent him home. He wasn’t officially suspended, but Art had explained Tim would take a few days of leave. For perhaps the first time in his adult life Tim had actually wanted to go. It was the right kind of quiet here.

Tim licked his lips and relished it. He had lingered in his house for a long time after he got home, pacing and angry, worried that if he left he would go and find Boyd Crowder and kill him. He’d watched TV and had learned that cooking shows calmed his mood. He’d also learned he got pissed when a chef would sexily lick icing or some such thing off her fingers while staring into the camera. But he only hated it because the male chefs didn’t do the same thing.

But then as night had fallen he’d gotten restless again but didn’t want to wander too far. He had some wood stored until the weather improved. He’d found some stones, dug a pit and lit a fire and he’d been sat beside it, slowly enjoying some rum he’d bought on the way home, as a reward for not tracking down Boyd and rearranging his face with a tire iron. He had the bottle set in the snow, keeping it cool, refilled his tumbler as the need came and he smoked slowly, relished each one.

He had thought he’d relapse entirely and drink himself unconscious like he used to, but the urge to blackout had passed him.

His breath pooled and steamed around him and Tim was wearing warm thermal clothes that in the heat from the fire were like being wrapped in a blanket, comforting and safe. He was tired, spent in fact, and he was enjoying being numb.

He was humming to himself. ‘ _My Girl’._

“So how _did_ you get hurt?” Raylan’s voce called and Tim let his eyes roll to the side, let his head follow to see Raylan, walking that cat -like predator stride down the garden towards him, the one that didn’t move his shoulders at all and was all in the hips. Tim had noticed it that first day Raylan arrived and until he spent thirty seconds in the mans company it had been a distraction.

“I got a sleepwalkin’ problem,” Tim said calmly, stared back at his fire as Raylan reached him. “There’s another chair,” he waved a hand towards the fence where a folding camping chair was leaning.

Raylan carried a bag in his arms and passed it to Tim before he fetched the chair. Tim smelled warm food and looked inside, saw take-out burgers, fries and even apple pies and soda, alongside a six pack of beer and a bottle of bourbon.

He looked up at Raylan who was settling himself in the chair he’d set out and wasn’t sure what to say. “You really a sleepwalker?” Raylan asked, taking off his hat briefly to run his hand through his hair. It was a nervous or anxious gesture he had, a tell. He settled the hat back in place.

“Since I was a kid,” Tim said truthfully. “Off and on until I was twelve, then it tailed off. It’s only a problem when I fall on my face durin’.”

“In the Army too?” Raylan asked, trying to keep it light, but Tim was in one of those rare moments when talking came easy.

“Once in Basic,” Tim said, thought back to the unpleasant wake up in the form of his Drill Sergeant screeching in his face. “Once after I finished Ranger School. I walked miles and woke up in this field. It was a real nice sunrise. This for me?” he motioned to the bag, the smells and scents of fresh cooked fast food overwhelming him.

“One meal is, you skinny bastard,” Raylan said curtly and Tim smirked. He grabbed the box with his burger and opened it out so he could dump his fries into the lid, retrieved the soda and his apple pie before he passed Raylan the bag.

“It happened over there?” Raylan asked as he took the bag and began to dig out his own food, and as always over there meant the Middle East, when Tim was a soldier.

“Not to my knowledge,” Tim trailed off to bite into his burger. It was a double or triple something or other and fully loaded with onions and relish and something that was battered and crispy and Tim groaned in relief. He hadn’t had an appetite before, but he did now.

“So Rachel,” Raylan was saying and Tim grimaced, the food turning to ash in his mouth just as quickly as the taste had thrilled him. He dropped the burger back in the box and it made enough of a noise to be dramatic. Tim reached for his rum and finished the glass, poured another.

“Come on,” Raylan admonished. “Eat your damn food and just listen. Not dealing with this is going to fucking kill you.” He glared at Tim and Tim glared at the fire.

He closed the container with his food in, left it in his lap, a tiny defiance. But he listened.

“It was the couple. The coyotes. Rachel looked at arrest records for Lucy and noticed there was always mention of the child, of arrangements for his care while Lucy was detained. So she looked at the coyotes too and neither of their records mention a child…until the day they do,” Raylan explained. “There’s a window…three months or so between arrests when this child comes into their care. Rachel dug deeper and found a record of Lucy registering Tim with a doctor durin’ that period. In this town…that thirty years ago had a 3 year old boy go missing.”


	14. Chapter 14

Tim’s ongoing silence became something he wouldn’t break. Couldn’t, really, even as Raylan waited for the questions, enquiries for more information. Tim didn’t want it. Or maybe he did. He didn’t know. The more he tried to think on it the more confused he got so he stayed silent and stared at his fire.

Raylan gave up and took his leave after less than an hour.

There was a missing persons report. There was a boy who may or may not be Tim’s, who had been cared about enough someone called the police over his absence.

But. There was a but hanging unspoken over the whole thin and Tim didn’t’ know what it was yet but he could sense it, like an animal senses danger. It drove him out of his house. The cacophony of the silence was making him crazy.

But this was Kentucky and the sun was down so it didn’t take long to find real sound to fill the echoing space inside his head that wanted so badly to fill its self with bad thoughts. He found a bar that had loud music and rough conversation and the floor still coated in sawdust and he hunched up against the bar, radiated ‘leave me the fuck alone’ and he enjoyed him some drinks. He let the noise fill him and carry him away and it was easier. The world stopped existing for a while.

He didn’t…quite mean to pick a fight. He had stepped outside to smoke after enough drinks to alter his mood and someone drunkenly, rambunctiously asked for a light and there was absolutely no reason to say ‘No’ and less reasons to say it with an attitude, but he did both.

It was almost like he wanted to get punched in the face.

The first hit took him across the jaw and to his chagrin it knocked his damn cigarette out of his mouth. But while he was deciding to be mad about that someone fast delivered three more blows that left his mouth filled with the taste of blood that he only noticed under after he registered the cement and tarmac under his hands the grit digging into his palms. He’d been knocked down at some point and he missed it. that wasn’t good.

 He got kicked so hard he was flipped onto his back. He had just enough time to curl up small before two, maybe three sets of jackboots descended.

A sad and self-pitying part of himself told him stay put, take what was coming, what he’d earned. But a much more powerful part of him reminded him he was a badass, god damn it he was a Ranger, and before that he’d been taught to fight since before he learned his letters and he’d only gotten more dangerous and he wasn’t about to let some drunks get the best of him. The voice was firm and urgent and told to get his ass up off the ground. He was on his feet, stepping into his first attacker before he figured out the voice was Henry.

He folded one man around his closed fist and drove a knee into the mans groin and bloodied his nose before the guy hit the ground but Tim was _drunk_ and he lost track of the two others until they tackled him. He was thrown into the wall and his head bounced off it with a ‘rrap’ sound he heard as much as he felt and it was the kind of pain you stop to curl up around but he couldn’t and he lashed out, caught a nose or a chin but his arm was batted away. He was tossed into the wall again and he slumped and a fist crashed into his torso and every breath left his body.

Then they were gone and there was grunting and Tim was hanging onto the wall and spitting blood from a cut inside his mouth. There was grunting and yelling but it faded and a hand grabbed Tim’s shoulder, dragged him to the kerb and made him sit, pushed his head down between his knees.

There was an absence, someone going away and coming back and Tim was handed one bottle of water and another was opened and a hand pulled his head back. Cold water hit his face and he gasped in shock but he ran his hand under the water to wash the blood off.

“Now,” a voice drawled and Tim actually understood the expression ‘blood runs cold’ as he recognised Boyd’s dulcet tones and became profoundly and deeply aware of just how vulnerable he was in this moment. If Boyd stabbed him right now he’d bleed out in the snow. He couldn’t even rely on help from inside the bar.

“Normally I’d be inclined to stand back and see you of all people take a thoroughly deserved whuppin’, but…three or two on one, even a Ranger as badasss,” the sarcasm was nearly a physical thing, “as you…it goes against my good sense of fairness and justice.” Boyd drawled.

Tim laughed, a cynical, barked sound that made a hot pain he didn’t know was there flare up his side, his ribs. He coughed, spat blood, opened his water to swill and spat some more, “ffffuck.”

Boyd was sitting beside him and every nerve ending in Tim’s body screamed to run but the man wasn’t doing anything other than sitting. He was staring up at the sky and while they sat he dug in a pocket and found a pack of cigarettes and lit one up. He took a few drags, wore the relief of someone who didn’t indulge as often as Tim.

“Why are you here?” Tim asked, his voice a raspy drawl.

“You don’t want to ask if I’m following you?” Boyd  asked. “Raylan would. Raylan assumes everyone is following him.”

“Isn’t Harlan missin’ it’s only set of complete teeth?” Tim asked.

Boyd laughed, a loud bark of real mirth and passed the cigarette over to Tim. Tim took it, took a drag, regretted it when his ribs flared again but it sure cleared his head.

 “Marshal. Let’s just clarify one thing; I am not in your fan club,” Boyd said. “I find myself more than once in a week wonderin’ what if you fell into a well? Or a bear raped you?”

“Fuck yourself,” Tim told him calmly , working his jaw and realising with a sinking feeling that he would look like shit in the morning and would have to explain something to somebody. Then he remembered he had a few days off. Silver linings.

“I don’t need to. I have Ava. And I know I can’t return the sentiment since you have…your friend” Boyd said calmly. “But since we clarified that I hate you, I nonetheless find myself wondering…are you entirely okay?”

Tim turned his head a little and eyed Boyd carefully. Was he really so fucked up that Boyd Crowder was asking after him? “Fuck it. I’m walking into traffic,” Tim said and he moved to get up.

Boyd’s hand easily stopped him and pulled him back down and Tim let him but he shrugged the hand off quickly.

 “Reason I ask is that one day you and me, we’re gonna finish this,” Boyd pointed vaguely to Tim, then himself. “But I need you to be 100% for that or it won’t satisfy me as much. Did that big island boy dump you? Charlie isn’t it?” he dropped the name with a sly smile and that purr like drawl of his that could feel flirtatious even when you knew for a fact it wasn’t. He just spoke like he was the Devil trying to recruit all the time, every day.

But Tim only half register that as his entire soul bristled and the urge to murder Boyd returned.

“You keep his name out of your mouth for the rest of your life,” Tim warned and he knew his calm draw spoke far more volumes than it seemed.

Boyd actually raised half a hand in a peace making gesture. “So then do you have cancer or something? You get called back up? Headin’ back to the desert?” Boyd asked. “Used to be messin’ with you was fun but if you’re this easy to upset there’s no sport in it.”

Tim turned to stare at him again. “Did I get knocked out?” he asked. “Or…die? Am I dead? Are you…concerned for me?”

Boyd shrugged. “I hope you choke in my bedtime prayers, but you’re smarter than Raylan is. Conversation moves faster. So…are you pregnant?” Boyd asked.

Tim laughed again and still hurt. “You plan to keep guessing all night?” he croaked. It was very weird. His mood was calming, somewhat.

“Will it make you deal with your shitty, ridiculous problems if I do?” Boyd asked.

“No,” Tim said firmly. “But I might go home and leave you here. Why the hell didn’t you go back to Harlan?”

“I wanted to. But the weather out there got worse after you assholes brought me up here so I’m stranded ‘til morning. You want to offer me a spare room?” Boyd drawled at him, shark black eyes glimmering.

 “If you told me you’d cure world hunger if I let you sleep in my bathtub, I would drown you in it,” Tim drawled and pondered briefly what his life was now. Fucked. It was fucked.

“You gettin’ called back to the Desert?” Boyd asked. “You finally learn the hard truth that your hero Raylan Givens is an asshole?”

“I knew that ten minutes after I met him,” Tim mused and Boyd chuckled.

“You find out he’s your father or something? You’re adopted and your real dad is Donald Trump?” Boyd tried and Tim felt that panic claw at him again, the idea Boyd might somehow know the actual truth burning through him. But his split second analysis of the question, the tone, the phrasing…Boyd was reaching. Guessing.

Tim rubbed at his temples. The cold silence of his house suddenly held some appeal.

“You find out you’re one of the Boys from Brazil?” Boyd asked next.

Tim got up and walked for his car.


	15. Chapter 15

You wouldn’t know to look at him but Tim was having a quiet but pretty fucking serious panic attack.

Tim watched the winding grey snake of the river as they climbed the mountain in Tim’s SUV, Rachel taking the wheel for the last stint of their drive. The town was called Devils Den and it sat nestled between two high mountain peaks that resembled horns, hence the name. It was as high up the mountain as you could be and still claim to be in civilised land but there were settlements higher up, they had been told.

Tim counted the fourth heavy log he’d seen drifting down the river, ends cut straight and the trunk stripped of bark, branches or outgrowths. It was somebodies unfinished $1000 dining set, some middle class families first grown up bed for their entitled little prince or princess, broken free of the lumber barges and its fate as high quality furniture.

It would wind up resting on a beach and rotting back to nothing, or maybe it would make it all the way to the sea and in months or years of eddies and tidal swirls it would end up somewhere tropical.

Tim was idly jealous. Their road followed another winding turn and Tim said goodbye to the log but kept his eyes on the river. It was helping his panic, the consistent winding streak of dark, the easy curves and turns of the river and the road almost hypnotic, like the pictures, gifs that Charlie had sent him emails full of, calming imagery designed to relax the mind, steady the racing pulse. Tim didn’t have them today. He had the river. In the cold, and it got colder every metre they climbed, the water was late black and dull like a sharks eyes but in the summer it would glow cerulean blue. There was a similar river in the town where Tim had grown up. He had spent entire summers in it when he could. He liked those summers. They were long and at times they were even carefree.

“There it is,” Rachel said and Tim turned his head but before he saw the town he saw lights and isolated homes in the hills and forests above faint squares he only saw because he was trained to see things others might miss. In the dark growing dark the mountainside was already looming and ominous but the faint indistinct glows burned like the stars Tim had stared up at from his garden. They looked deceptively close but would be hours if driving away from the town, each other. He let his eyes drop and saw the town nestled besides a flowing river, lights glittering in the snow as the sun fell and dusk settled.

Tim’s hearing tuned out and a white noise crept in over the radio and the idle conversation of his friends. His heart began to pound and he thought of the Edgar Allen Poe story about guilty hearts. Only his wasn’t guilty.

They weren’t here as Marshals, officially, though a very generous local Sheriff had agreed to give them access to old files like they were. Rachel had called it information gathering. Raylan had told Tim to think the same thing.

Tim wanted to be sick at the idea of going to the town. He had, every night since Raylan had come over, since his very strange encounter with Boyd Crowder outside a bar in Lexington. He had come home that night and washed the blood from his face and by some miracle he didn’t look too awful. He’d looked shit to begin with so he only had up to go, and as it turned out, for as much as it all hurt and he got bloodied up, the three drunks hadn’t hit him _that_ hard.

 Each mile closer made his anxiety creep up in fractional increments. He didn’t know why. Maybe he was afraid it would all come to nothing. Or that it would actually matter and maybe this was his home town and somehow the idea scared him. He didn’t want to think too hard about the idea he might somehow know to be scared. Especially when he just didn’t think there was anything to be achieved.

But, Art had not so subtly suggested that until Tim did _something_ he would be surfing his desk and Tim had gone years without talking to mental health professionals ,unless someone made him, and didn’t plan to change that now. So here he was. At least it would be over quickly. It would be a dead end and they could go home. The idea didn’t make him feel much better.

They were still in Kentucky but had driven most of a day higher and higher into mountains that only got more rough, less friendly as they climbed. Tim’s ears had popped more than once and they were high enough that the cold was creeping in under the heater Rachel was running on as high as she could.

Tim hadn’t spoken the entire drive but Rachel and Raylan had worked with Tim long enough to know that his silences could be legendary and had left him to it. They had talked to each other and had managed to include him in their conversations without needing him to respond to anything. He had listened to their idle chatter, responded in his head, forced himself not to think about anything but the car ride. But it hadn’t changed his mood.

An anger and an anxiety bubbled under his skin and now they were at the town his mind went forcibly blank, a self defence mechanism kicking in as the anxiety doubled up and the urge to be _away_ was threatening to overwhelm him.

It had happened suddenly, from nowhere and though he knew objectively he was having a panic attack. But knowing what was happening didn’t make it stop. He felt sweat prickle his skin under his clothes, cracked his window slightly though just minutes before he’d been too cold.

He tried to focus, tried to concentrate on his breathing as Rachel followed the GPS to a sheriffs station at the heart of the town. The snow up here was heavier on the ground than down below but the people were more prepared for it. The streets were cleared and snow banks piled up along the roads and people came and went, lived their lives. The town, small and isolated though it was, was well populated and had found some way to thrive.

Tim only noticed this because he was trying to think about anything else other than their reason for being and the bubbling panic that was gripping him. What was this? He didn’t want to be here, he didn’t want to be in this town.

 Rachel and Raylan were oblivious. The SUV stopped and they got out and Tim fought his own rising fear, followed them towards a red brick building that under a coating of snow and lit by bright halogens that flared off the icy air and looked almost picturesque. An instant later Tim’s mind compared it to the external shots of the hotel from The Shining, _after_ Jack went axe murder crazy and chased his family into the maze.

Inside there was a flurry of greetings in an over warm lobby, windows moist on the inside from the gathered body heat of dozens of sweaty cops and visitors. Shaken hands and warm smiles were exchanged and the Sheriff, a man named Hahn gave a thirty second tour, offered coffee and warm drinks asked after their drive as he led them towards his office in the back of the building. Raylan was doing most of the talking and Rachel was looking at Tim over her shoulder and he figured his silence was starting to become a problem. But he daren’t open his mouth.


	16. Chapter 16

Rachel ignored Tim’s stony demeanour and his decision to go entirely mute and she followed Hahn through the old station house and reminded herself this was deeply, profoundly personal for her young friend. Privacy wasn’t a strong enough word for what Tim cultured about himself and the events of his life since his ‘mothers’ death had exploded that world he was so precious about. She remembered her own discomfort when her personal life had briefly become her job but for her there had been a problem to fix, a strong family unit to protect and preserve.

Tim had the opposite problem. He had nothing to protect and arguably nothing to neatly resolve. For all Rachel thought knowledge would help him she had also measured the possibility that if Tim was removed from his birth family, it may have been to protect him.

She set the idea aside, wanted to focus on just being here, now.

 Deputies glanced up, nodded greetings and smiles of hello, a friendly bunch not perturbed by the presence of three strangers in their midst. It was a nice feeling after the long drive, to be welcomed and not viewed as some kind of enemy like so often happened. Maybe it was being as Marshals but not on duty. There was no tension, no resentment the Marshals had swept in to step on any toes.

Hahn was in his fifties and his jaw was softening and his hair was thinning but he still looked alright to Rachel’s eye. He had the kind of easy confidence, looks and physique that screamed of football team captain and he spoke with an easy intelligence. He was a natural Sheriff, a leader type who probably still sincerely called High School ‘the best years of my life’.

She liked him.

Outside his office, he called to a deputy to bring coffees and showed them into an office that was decorated with family photos and accolades in a ratio Rachel found reassuring, the man decorated but favouring his wife and kids in his decorative efforts. He offered them seats across from his desk and settled into his own chair. “I never met Marshals before,” he admitted with a sheepish grin, eyeing Raylan’s hat. “You all look the part, I gotta say.”

“We practice,” Raylan smiled back at him and Hahn chuckled.

“So,” Hahn frowned a little, looked apologetic as he focussed on Rachel. “You think you’ve found my missing kid? The one….we’re only half sure is missing?”

Rachel felt Raylan turn to look at her, ignored him and cast a sidelong look at Tim who hadn’t yet moved and was starting to spook her with his near full day of stony silence and now he looked almost feverish. She waited a second and he glanced at her, his eyes asking a furious question behind something else a little wild.

 “Sheriff…would you give me your account of the case?” Rachel said calmly, trying not to take the look Tim gave her so personally. She hadn’t been entirely honest about this part, to Raylan or to Tim. The missing childs report had been closed the day after it was filed. But she had a feeling she couldn’t shake. When she had learned of this case, it had struck a nerve for her. It was the right case, she was certain.

Hahn shrugged, opened the slim manila folder he took from an in-tray and looked down at a single paged typed report, looked back up. “We got a community higher up the mountain than us, couple three families spread out over a few thousand acres. Way the roads are, the nearest neighbour a body might have is a couple hours of drivin’. They’re some of the oldest local families, nice folks but they like keepin’ to themselves. They own all that land and they got some kind of businesses keep them going and…we don’t bother them so much,” Hahn started to explain easily. Rachel watched, wondering if she would detect something, but he seemed on the level as he continued;

“Until the last few years they barely came down to the town at all…Leia Wolff is from that community. Her father is the de factor leader up there and…well, Leia, thirty years ago she drove three hours into town to report her son had gone missing to a Deputy. She told my guy she had searched for this boy for hours herself before she drove down to us and these folks don’t ask outsiders for help…so Clark hopped in his cruiser and followed her back up the mountain. They got to her house to find her father waiting and he reported the boy was up another few hours driving up the mountain, at his house. It seemed the kid hopped in his grandpas truck when the old man stopped by that morning. These folks…they didn’t have phones then so it wasn’t like he could just call her and let her know and way their life is, he couldn’t just drop everythin’. He didn’t know she was even missin’ the boy ‘til after she’d come into town. So, Clark…came home. Next day he filed the case as closed.”

“Never laying eyes on the boy, never actually getting look at him and finding out if he was okay?” Rachel asked gently and Hahn nodded.

“Is it unusual to actually file the case and not just…toss it out as a false alarm?” Raylan was asking and Rachel nearly slumped with relief. His interest was piqued. Tim remained silent and still and his presence kept fading from Rachel’s peripheral vision.

“I called the guy, Clark, asked about that. He’s in Florida now, moved out a decade or so back. He didn’t make an excuses for not goin’ on up the mountain. He had young kids at home himself, it was late…but he should have gone up, he knows that. He said he filed it because Leia insisted he keep the polaroid she had brought with her, left at the station in case they needed to make posters later. He offered to bring it back but she said no, almost insisted he keep his copy,” he shrugged, incapable of rationalising the decisions another man had made some thirty years gone.

He passed over a faded polaroid and Rachel turned it around, gazed sadly at the image of a smiling three year old with dirty blonde hair, huge grey eyes and a natural pout that made her pulse race a little. It was Tim’s mouth, that petulant set to the features, Tim’s eyes to some degree. There was a name scrawled in ink at the bottom, a date the photo was taken and Rachel read aloud, “Cody.”

Tim’s chair fell back so hard it the ground with a crack like a gun shot.


	17. Chapter 17

He was on his feet before Rachel finished talking, walking for the door, into the corridors, his memory of their walk in leading him right back outside again. He was taken back to a night in a bar with Raylan, to a night many years before that, in a fairground in California, where the air smelled of machine oil and carnival food and Lucy Gutterson was drunk;

_‘Last time I saw my mother I was eight years old and she took my pocket money to buy beers. She called me Cody. Twice.’_

He reached the outside and the cold air hit him like a brick but his skin burned and his stomach rolled and the panic rose up and overwhelmed him and he stared at the icy tarmac because if he looked up he would start to see threats and he might draw his gun and that would be a terrible thing.

He bent at the waist and was so violently sick his ears rang


	18. Chapter 18

Raylan found him leaning heavily against a wall, ashen and sweaty, eyes red rimmed as he glanced up, wild eyed and afraid at Raylan’s approach. He looked strung out, like he’d been doing coke for days and at his feet was a small puddle of vomit, largely bile but Tim panted like he’d been sprinting.

Raylan ran a hand over his own mouth, holding back curses and he tried to decide if he should acknowledge how badly Tim was shivering. He glanced back at the Tim who looked all of ten years old and scared.

 “Come here,” he said softly and with great care he took Tim’s upper arm and led the younger man. He edged towards the Sheriffs station but Tim pulled back, a tiny pressure that Raylan read loud and clear and without missing a beat he turned back towards the SUV.

Tim was shaking so hard he couldn’t stand up straight but Raylan pushed him back against the SUV, all but holding him upright. He didn’t have the fucking keys, he realised and the SUV was locked. Raylan cursed again but pushed it aside and turned his attention to Tim who was starting to hyperventilate, his eyes glazing as he went somewhere inside his own head. Raylan couldn’t have that.

He thought fast on what he knew about panic attacks and about Tim and he gently took Tim’s arm and Tim let Raylan sit him on the cold ground and lean back against the SUV. Tim made a sound, a sort of growl of frustration behind lips he pressed together in a thin flat line, closing his eyes as he let his head fall hard back against the SUV. There was a look on his face, like he knew this wasn’t okay, that he had to get a handle on it but he couldn’t. He pulled his knees up, lay his hands flat on the tarmac like he was trying to hold himself there or getting ready to launch like a sprinter.

Raylan crouched down beside him, didn’t want to loom over him or seem intimidating and he took off his hat and stared over the car park outside the cop station. “I don’t know what’s gonna stop this, so I’m just gonna talk, so listen, but Tim…. _listen,_ ” he said softly and from memory, he recited baseball stats from his high school team and when they ran out he talked about the teams he’d followed at college and teams he followed even now, when his life wasn’t absolute chaos, and he was talking up the Mariners last season Tim seemed to…stop.

A tension bled out from his body, slowly, incrementally. The legs he’d pulled up under his chin were stretched out and Tim winced like his knees had locked up and he took a deep breath and it exhaled shaky. He wiped at his face, at his eyes and Raylan ‘didn’t notice’.

“Cody,” Tim’s voice was quiet and rough and he coughed to clear it. “His name was Cody.”

Raylan nodded. He remembered that night, that conversation in a bar after Tim’s mother died and no one understood why he was so unaffected. She had called him the wrong name. Or, as it appeared, the right one.

Tim was fumbling, shaking hands trying to get into a pocket and Raylan leant over and pulled Tim’s coat open, fished in a pocket for the smokes and the lighter. Tim let him, which spoke volumes and it was his consent that said his thanks yous for him. Tim took the box, tapped one cigarette out.

He slumped back against the SUV, an unlit cigarette held between his lips. “Sorry,” he said with a small frown like he wasn’t sure why he said it all.

He raised his hands around the cigarette and lit up, those smooth, easy, experienced gestures that Raylan couldn’t help but watch. Tim was such a still person in every other facet of his life but in this way he came alive, was so animated.

“Don’t ever apologise to me because something hit you hard. Not ever. You don’t have to apologise for that. You been nursin’ that the whole drive?” Raylan asked him. “Or it just come on like that?”

“Nursin’ it,” Tim admitted.

“I thought you were quiet, even for you,” Raylan noted and without asking he reached over and took the cigarette, took a small drag and passed it back. “You see the picture?” Raylan asked and Tim shook his head, glanced over like he was nervous Raylan might produce it.

Raylan did, looked at it a long time. It was the eyes. The eyes were all Tim. The name scrawled in the white frame was not neat, had a distinct childs shape and shakiness, a young child. Maybe the three year old himself.

Raylan passed it across and Tim only hesitated for half a second before he took it and stared at it. He traced a finger over the childish handwriting. His hands started shaking again.

He said nothing, for a long, long time but after a while he reached into an inside pocket and withdrew a hand softened photograph, the kind printed from a negative in some photo lab somewhere a long time ago. He passed both pictures back to Raylan, who examined them side by side. His heart raced. He felt it beat faster as he observed the old picture.

It was the kind of photo where the flash had left the background dark and uncertain but Raylan could make out a couch, TV, someones den in which the cute little boy was seated. Tim, and it was so clearly Tim that Raylan nearly laughed, was front and centre, looking up and off to the left with those huge grey-blue eyes that were bright and inquisitive but uncertain, his whole expression one of trepidation. His dark blonde hair was ruffled and curly and he wore a t-shirt with ‘Star Wars’ printed on the front and if Raylan squinted at the darkened background he could see a banner and maybe a birthday cake and maybe a dark spot on Tim’s face was cake icing. It looked much more like a good sized bruise, the kind left when a hand slaps a face, quick and smart across the jaw and chin, a short, sharp shock for a child you know is too small for anything harder. Raylan had similar pictures.

It was the same boy as the polaroid. A little older, a little taller, the difference between three and five bigger than Raylan had realised. Three was basically a toddler, a baby. Five was a little person.

“I wrote this,” Tim ran a thumb over the childs careful letters ‘C O D Y’. “I remember this. And my mom laughed and asked who was gonna forget it was me?”

Raylan stared at him. “Seriously?”

“I…before today I would have said it was Nana who laughed. And that I wrote ‘Tiger’…my Pops called me Tiger,” Tim said in that same hoarsened voice, still so quiet. “But…I wrote this,” he held the polaroid firm so it shook a little in his hand as if for emphasis. “It was a big deal. I didn’t have any pictures of me before that.”

“You remember it bein’ taken?” Raylan asked and he tried not to sound as urgent as he felt and resisted the urge to turn his whole self to stare at Tim. He stared out over the car park, nodded a hello to a concerned looking deputy making his slow way into the station house.

Tim was quiet and thoughtful after a time he shook his head slowly, a no. But he spoke, “I remember lights on a string in a thick forest and someone in the woods. Someone I was scared of.”


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So.... I've been away while. 
> 
> I am deeply, truly sorry at how long it's taken to update, but the brutal fact is Life Happened.   
> I had a pretty stressful job, that got harder and harder, and then with no small measure of drama, I left that job quite suddenly. Then Emotions happened, panic, anxiety, depression and the like. These are horrible things and they sap the life and energy from me. 
> 
> I don't offer this as an excuse, I owe you all so much better. I just don't want you to think I abandoned this story or all you wonderful people. 
> 
> Thankfully, things are better. I have a new job that is almost entirely stress free (and pays better too, woot!) and as the weeks at this job have ticked happily along, I have been flooded with ideas and the urge to finish Tim's story.
> 
> I do want to write more of him, and will, once I finish this. 
> 
> Thank you all so much for your patience and I am, again, so sorry. 
> 
> I am posting these now, and more are written and ready to come, and the ending is very much in sight. 
> 
> All of my love, N.

They left him alone for a while and he wasn’t sure he wanted to be, at first. They checked into their motel after Rachel finished up with the Sheriff, then she and Raylan went out to find food. They left with that look in their eyes, that pity that Tim hated so much and that’s what made it easier to be alone. 

Tim wasn’t sure what to do with himself while he waited, though. He showered quickly to clean off the sweat and the sticky feeling from dumping all his bodies moisture as panic sweat, walked around the motel room, sat at the little table and tried to find something on TV to watch in the hope he might actually be able to focus.

They were going up the mountain tomorrow, to see the family. It would, one or another, be over soon. Tim would know if this was his family, his home.

If it wasn’t, if it was a dead end, he was prepared. He’d talk to Rachel, make it clear that he appreciated her efforts but didn’t want them, he didn’t want her to look for him, his family, any more. He wanted to be done. He knew she’d push back and point out what a wreck he was and he was prepared for that too.

He’d agree with her. He had to, since it was the truth so he’d just agree with her and agree to do something about it. If it turned out to be a mistake, and this was not his home.

If it wasn’t a mistake? The thought made him get up out of the seat and pace more. This town didn’t feel like home, didn’t feel familiar but it wouldn’t, if his family had stayed up on the mountainside. The polaroid had been familiar and it had been a strange sensation, a memory he didn’t know he had, a certainty he hadn’t expected.

He still had the photo. The Sheriff had made a glossy colour copy for them that Rachel had left on one of the beds, beside her bag. Tim walked over and looked again. It was him and he wrote the name. He stepped away, shuddered a little. It was creepy.

He heard voices, Rachel and Raylan talking as they came back with the food and Tim crossed to a bed, sat down, then lay, then turned quickly so his back was to the door. As the door opened he exhaled slowly, let his body slump as if he was prone, sleeping. The talking stopped and there was a polite hush and the smell of really good take out.

“Tim?” Rachel called softly, but he didn’t move, pretended to be sleeping. “We’ll save yours,” she said. “We’ll eat in my room if you want to come next door.”

The door closed again and there was a flow of cold air from the outside that the heater quickly overcame.

Tim opened his eyes and stared at the bland, motel room wallpaper, felt childish and stupid and angry and wondered why he didn’t just talk to his friends.

++

“Shit,” Hahn said and it was not the first time.

The weather station had reported the snow storm would not set in for another day, but a few hours into their drive, the heavy and pregnant clouds had opened and the air outside their windows had filled with fat flakes. They were trapped on a narrow road that fell away on both sides to steep gullies and there was no safe way to turn around, try to head back. Their option was to power on, find the Wolff house and ride out the storm there or nearby, if Ms. Wolff permitted. In theory they had not been that far away and even allowing for the slowing effect of the weather they shouldn’t have taken more than three hours to reach the home.

They had been driving for five and Hahn was quite confident they were lost.

GPS didn’t work up here. They were reading a paper map Hahn had unfolded between his seat and Raylan’s and was tracking their route out of tone, trying to orient their current location with a compass he let sit beside the map.

It was dark out now and though a howling wind had long died away, snow still fell in fat heavy flakes that wrapped the world in the thick quiet unique to snowy weather.

Tim was too hot inside the car and wanted to smoke more than he wanted to watch Hahn fret.

“Tim,” Raylan said, “you take a look?” he looked over at Hahn who was trying to pretend not to look a little stung. “He was a Ranger in the Army,” he said.

Hahn’s expression switched and he sat back, eager for Tim to take a look and Tim nodded, “Mind if I do it outside?” he asked. “I need to smoke.”

Hahn pointed Raylan to a heavy duty flashlight and the taller Marshall followed Tim into the darkened night and the heavy falling snow.

Tim stood a second in it. Snow had a special kind of sound, a faint hissing sometimes lost to the winds or the sound of your roaring fire. But outside it was there. The only light was from their headlamps and the powerful torch. They were surrounded by dense trees, the road long and bare before and behind them. Raylan cast the light around but there was nothing unique, nothing that stood out that might help them orient their position on the map. If it was light, if Hahn could see the shapes of the surrounding mountains, he would likely know exactly where they were. At night, there wasn’t much hope. The prospect of sleeping in the car didn’t entice much.

Tim lit up his cigarette as Raylan swept snow off the hood of the car and lay the map out, compass beside it and cast the beam of his light over the paper. Tim walked over, the rush of nicotine chasing away some of the chill, the purposeful work of looking at the map chasing away the faint anxiety he still carried, had done all day. For Tim, working was how he normally coped with his problems. This one had been severe enough to disrupt even that but something as simple as making sure they got home was a workable anchor.

Raylan pointed out the town, followed a route Hahn had drawn in highlighter marker to a spot the man had more recently marked in red pen. “We got here, he’s sure,” he said. “At least that far. We should have taken a left there and then it would have been a straight run for a couple hours, then a turn onto the farm,”

“We took the left,” Tim said, leaning over the hood, then rolling his eyes and stepping up onto the bumper to see better.

Raylan tried to pretend he wasn’t laughing as Tim passed the cigarette over. He raised his eyes to see Rachel watching, shaking her head as Raylan took the smoke, shrugged at her and mouthed ‘He made me!’.

“Problem is, we got three lefts on that road and the other two lead away from town, And we took a couple more turns,” Tim recalled. He checked the compass, then the map. “We know the town is south…but none of these roads head south…” he looked again, “and the farm was north eastish,” he said, touching Hahn’s mark on the map.”

Raylan passed back the cigarette and waited for Tim’s mind to work. Tim took a drag and felt another head clearing rush, but it wouldn’t help.

“We could be anywhere in here,” he drew a rough circle with his finger.

“Sooo,” Raylan asked.

Tim sighed regretfully. “Uh, we’re pretty lost. I can’t get us back to town just knowin’ it’s south. South of…where,” he looked up. “I need something to know where we are.”

“Soooo,” Raylan repeated.

Tim said nothing and finished smoking, tossing the but aside and gathering the map and compass. They got back inside the comfortable space of the SUV and told Hahn the problem. He mulled it over.

“We keep going,” he said. “We look for a farm or something tells us where we are,” he shrugged. “I got nothing else and I don’t fancy riding this out in the car, if we don’t have to.”

“You got fuel,” Rachel asked.

“Enough,” Hahn nodded.

“Just…take it slow. It’s deep out there,” Raylan said and Tim could tell from his voice he wasn’t entirely happy to keep going.


	20. Chapter 20

“Stop,” Tim said in that voice he had, the military one that cut through everything, cut through conscious thought and made the body react before the mind did.

Hahn touched the brakes carefully and the SUV slowed, avoided sliding as it drew to a stop. Tim was rolling out already, Raylan passing back the flashlight he’d kept in his lap from their earlier brake and Tim jogged out into the snow. He cast the torch over the trees which appeared to be leaning and in and ringing the road around them as if trying to pen them in. It felt mythical, like they had reached some ancient world. Tim wanted to go home and watch _Legend_  when this was all done.

The snow was falling heavier, the susurrating hiss sounding like human whispers to Tim’s ears but he ignored it, jogged back following the SUV tracks to what he thought he had seen.

It was a gate, the solid iron kind used to keep cattle where it should be. The fence posts it was planted in were more metal and poured concrete and as Tim got closer he saw a half concealed chain link fence ran behind nearby trees, bushes and flowers grown thick to try and keep the metal links from being too easy to spot.

The night before he had felt a strange buzz of familiarity when he saw the polaroid of…well, of himself, of the boy called Cody. He had recognised something familiar that he didn’t even know he knew.

He had the same feeling now. The old fence was worn and rusted but not unused. Tim walked over and reached a hand, touched the freezing metal, finding no sign or marker post.  

‘Rourke’. The word came to his mind despite the lack of signs but he knew it was the name given to this farm, the word you would use to tell people you were heading up.  He closed his eyes, thought  of the map he’d earlier examined but he hadn’t seen the Rourke farm alongside any roads. But then, he knew it wasn’t on the maps. They liked it that way.

“Tim?” Rachel called from behind him and Tim turned, tried to pretend he hadn’t jumped when she spoke.

“There’s a farm up here,” Tim said. Rachel frowned.

“From the map?” she had the folded paper in her hand and raised at it to squint in the glow of her phone. Hahn stood behind her, hands shoved in his pockets and his head and neck tucked into his collar. He frowned at the gate, the hidden chain link fence, looked confused.

Tim shook his head. “No. But there’s a farmhouse up here. It’s blue, the house. It’s got a bathtub out front that’s full of wild flowers.”

“Are you serious?,” Rachel asked. “You’re saying you’ve been here? Is this…your home, the Wollf farm?”

“No,” Tim said. It was a weird feeling, not a pleasant one, having thoughts and memories unfurl inside his head. Maybe it would be easier if they were not his own memories, if it was like remembering details of a case, familiar only through repetition.

This was different. It was something like déjà vu, a certainty he absolutely had been here. He had hoped it would be a dead end. The polaroid had destroyed any chance of that but Tim had still been reluctant to finish it. When the storm had rolled in he had truly hoped they would turn around.

He knew, given some time, he could talk Rachel and Raylan into letting it go and returning with him to Lexington. He knew, too, that he’d have to do the work to get better than he was and he didn’t have a formal plan for that, yet. He had been thinking about how and coming up blank, especially since he’d already found himself a bunch of weak excuses to rule out therapy or AA.

But something about this fence, the blue farmhouse he knew lay beyond was jangling a nerve at the back of his skull and he knew the feeling wouldn’t go away. He realised with surge of something like frustration and grief mingled together that what ever he had tried to tell himself he wouldn’t get better if they just went home. Not now. He had hoped he could just accept it all, just get over it and begin to get on with his life. But that time had come and gone and he’d only gotten worse. He’d tried to pretend that when Charlie came home it would help, but it wouldn’t, he knew. The revelation hurt but quick on its heels came a kind of calm realisation; once he finished this, he would be okay. Rachel had actually been right. Tim hadn’t seen it yet, but now it seemed obvious.

He exhaled and felt a strange sort of weight lift from him, one he didn’t know he’d been carrying.

“I need to see this house,” he said again. “I knew these people.”

“Now wait,” Hahn started speaking at the same time Raylan did but let the taller man continue.

“You happen to recall if they’re welcoming to strangers?” Raylan asked, walking past Rachel and Tim to examine the gate and see if it could be unlocked. It was padlocked and chained from the inside, a clear sign visitors would not be entirely welcome after all. “They don’t look it.”

“No dogs, though,” Rachel said. “They’d be over here by now.”

“I don’t know,” Tm was saying by way of answer. “ That’s not their real name, either, Rourke. It’s the farm, not the people,” Tim said, the memory coming in another of those weird déjà vu moments. “But I remember the house.”

“Are they safe?” Raylan asked, a shortened version of his first question.

“I don’t know. But I need to see that house, Raylan,” Tim said and he felt an urgency he couldn’t fight against. He meant the word ‘ _need’._

Raylan looked to Rachel, who looked back and shrugged herself. “If he needs to,” she said.

“We’ve come this god damned far,” Raylan said, sounding tired but maybe a little hopeful that they had neared and end point.

Tim felt distantly like he might be able to sleep very soon. It was a nice feeling. The drive to get over the fence became stronger.

“Son,” Hahn started. “I know how important this is, but if you remember anything you remember that these people can be paranoid isolationist. This could be dangerous.”

Tim nodded,” But any more dangerous than riding out the storm in the car? Or driving around til we run out of gas or slip on ice and go over a ridge?” he shrugged, acutely aware that he was working against his own good instincts and experience. “Even if I didn’t…know I know this place…we still need directions.”

Hahn thought about it, chewed his lip. “Hide your badges. You got them on the hip, put them inside your coat or something. Don’t be Marshals right away. We all going?” he asked.

“I saw you favourin’ that knee,” Tim said calmly and Hahn looked faintly relived he didn’t have to bring it up himself.

“Cold plays merry hell with it,” he admitted. “I can’t get up that hill,” he motioned to the land behind the fence.

“You two go,” Rachel said. “Between you both you’re almost one semi competent boy scout. We’ll guard the car and finish the hot cocoa in the thermos’” she smiled. “Be very, very damn careful.”


	21. Chapter 21

In the day the forest would be picturesque and in the summer it would be lush and green, filled with life in rich bloom. At night in the snow it was unsettling. Shadows pooled between branches, un touched by their dulled light. Overhead the snow still fell, hissing and whispering and it was easy to imagine the whispering had a flow, belonged to a consciousness. They carried Hahn’s flashlight but under an advisement from Tim they’d wrapped the end in a dark t shirt, muting the glow of the beam so it served more like a lantern, masking their passage through the woods as they followed a winding road that ran back from the gate. Rather than walk the road directly Tim had taken them a few feet into the thick trees, so they could see and follow the track, but wouldn’t be out in the open should they approach anything.

“You think it’s nice in the summer?” Raylan asked quietly, most for something to say in the whispering quiet of the snow and the crunch of their footfalls on the forest floor.

“It’s amazing in the summer. Like a damn fairy tale,” Tim said without thinking and he sensed Raylan turn to look at him. 

“Oh yeah,” the older man asked. “How…clearly you remember things now? Should I prepare for a total personality change and then you’ll tell me ‘there is no Tim, only Cody’?” it was a light joke and he offered it in as harmless a tone as he could, lest the subject be touchy.

But Tim actually laughed, actually felt weirdly okay with being teased a little. “What if,” Tim asked, “Cody was a pacifist?”

“What if he hated reading,” Raylan mused. “What’ll you do with all your books?”

“I was three when I got lost,” Tim pointed out. “Probably wasn’t much of  reader as it was.”

“Well there you go,” Raylan said as if his concerns were validated. “We’ll have to get rid of your books. What if he was more of a nerd than you? Or cooler than you.”

“No one is cooler than me,” Tim smiled back. He passed Raylan the lantern and dug out his smokes, shooting an apologetic look over at Raylan.

“You should know better, “Raylan told him and Tim arched an eyebrow as he cupped his hands around the lighter flame.

“Howsat?” he asked, cigarette bobbing between his lips as he tried to light it. “M’already gonna die someday.”

“Gee Captain Optimism, slow down there,” Raylan drawled. “I mean as a sniper, in the dark, in unknown territory. That’s like a laser sight for a bad guy,” he nodded to the glowing cherry but as he did Tim took the cigarette from his mouth from above, pinching with his thumb and forefinger so his palm curled around and hid the glowing cigarette from sight.

“Like I’m some rank amateur,” he teased Raylan, exhaling a plume of smoke that chased some of the cold from his chest. “I learned to hide this from Henry when I was fourteen, Givens,” he said, but for the very first time Raylan looked disappointed he was smoking. And oddly, Tim wasn’t annoyed about that. “Look, I’ll quit after this…day…not this one,” he jerked his hand to indicate the cigarette, “this day,” he told Raylan’s disapproving stare. “Why you got a problem with it now?”

“Oh, I had a problem with it back in Texas,” Raylan assured him. “I’m not gonna give you shit like I’m the stern but caring step dad,” he said, turning to move on. But then he stopped, turned back with a deep, almost resigned sigh. “If you repeat this, I’ll deny it first and whup your ass later…but…I was thinking…since your own family…maybe families plural, are a little…non traditional…It might be nice for you…to have something like a real one. I  want you  be around in Willa’s life, where you can, in case the day comes I’m not the fastest one on the draw, and even if that doesn’t happen and I’m still here. Rachel, Art…and you, you little shit. No ones gonna pick on her at school if Uncle Tim shows her how Rangers break arms and legs. And she’s gonna love you, a lot. I’d rather not introduce you formally if she has to watch your lungs rot out of your chest when she’s twelve.”

Tim stopped walking and stared at the back of the older man, the broad shoulders and narrow waist, Raylan hunched in against the cold as he rose over a small rocky ridge.  Raylan sensed his pause and turned, frowning. “You coming?” he asked irritably. “I’ll never have another kid if we stay out here too long. My actual balls are freezing off.”

Tim though, he’d forgotten the cold. There was a very funny, silly, chest centre of warmth inside his chest and he couldn’t help a faint smile that was creeping up over his face. “Uncle Tim?” he asked and couldn’t help that smile ecking into his voice, too.

“Yes, you ass,” Raylan said, feigning irritability but hiding a smile as well. “Uncle Tim with the stupid face and dumb hair. And lungs full of tar.”

Tim took one final draw on his cigarette then dropped it on the ground, crushing it under his boot.

“You still got the pack?” Raylan asked lightly, hiding a very pleased, very fraternal smile as he turned back to walking.

“I have four,” Tim admitted.

“Left?” Raylan frowned.

Tim was silent for a second. “Four packs. On me right now.”

There was more silence as their boots crunched over frozen leaves and branches. “How off your back do you need everyone to be while you do this?” Raylan joked but he was asking semi seriously.  

“Well, you can try talk Art into sending me to a beach resort with a truck load of nicotine patches and no fixed return date. Or I can ride it out at the office and I’ll almost certainly beat Nelson to death with his stapler.”

Raylan laughed. “Wouldn’t that happen one day, regardless?” he joked.

“Who can say…but yes,” Tim said lightly and Raylan laughed again. Tim didn’t really hate Nelson, he actually sort of loved the big dumb idiot. But he was fun to mess with.

They finally saw a light through the trees, spotlights glimmering off the snow and as they got closer they heard generators humming. They reached the tree edge and passed into a wide open space and Tim saw ahead a tall blue farm house, lit up by lights on the front of the house and hung from poles around the yard, washing everything in white light. Out front, half buried in the snow there was a rusted, pitted old bathtub. Snow had coated and killed the wildflowers but in the summer they would be colourful and bright and would fill the air with heady pollens. Behind the house there was the edge of a green house, the glass panels just visible around the roof of the home. Tim stared at the yard and felt a very strange sense. Not of home, but somewhere he knew.

\-- _three and a bundle of energy he had bound from the truck and run through the rows of the vegetable garden and into the warm waiting arms of the woman he knew as Mima, who had wild black curls she never tied back, wore around her head like a crown. She was not kin, mama said, not family by blood but she was close as he had to a grandma and she adored him. She swept him up in a hug, spun him so his legs wheeled out behind him and he squealed a laugh. She would swing him like that whenever he ran to her, however long they stayed up at the farm, around like a pinwheel while he laughed at her. He would stay close to her or mama at the farm. He didn’t like the other people who might be around there otherwise. He laughed as she set him down and he looked behind her at her guests waiting on the porch, two women who looked like Mama and someone else behind them, a man, who smiled and waved and said something about bringing a friend for him to play with._

_Mima always had guests. Always had friends of her own, but none for him. Until today._

“Tim?” Raylan was asking, “come on.”

Tim had drawn to a stop but spurred his feet on, his head filling with sounds, images, sensations.

_He was walking around the farm mostly by himself. That was what happened up here, everyone came and went to visit each other and the kids were left to play alone, no one paying much attention. He liked it like that. He could explore the woods around the house, find bugs, snails and worms he could keep and show Mama at home. He was crouching in the long grass by the green house, looking for earth worms and he could smell the cigarettes Seth smoked as the man worked inside.  Seth was in the greenhouse and Seth scared him. Seth scared him a lot. Seth was the only one he’d run from, that was how scary Seth was._

_“Hi,” he heard a voice behind him and turned and saw another boy, little like him, his hair black like the night sky. He was with Mima’s guests, her friends. “Wanna play?”_

_He nodded, turned and ran after the black haired boy._

“Hey,” Raylan touched his arm and Tim flinched, jumped as he was pulled out of the memories that had flooded him.

 “I met him here,” Tim said, taking a shaky breath.

“Who?” Raylan asked and if Tim wasn’t teetering on the edge of a great big chasm of half formed memories he would have joked that Raylan sounded like a bird with his ‘heys and who’s’.

Tim blinked, tried to form his mouth around the words as memories long since locked away began to spill forwards. “Tim,” he said. “I met Tim, here. Right there,” he pointed to a space to the side of the green house.


	22. Chapter 22

Up close the farmhouse was still blue but it was faded, the paint peeled away from the wall, window frames cracked and rotting around glass that was old enough it still had those old sculpted rings. Out front sat the bathtub, filled now with snow, the flowers frozen and dead under the winter cold and beyond the tub were old traces of what in the summer months was, or had been, a vegetable garden.

Tim felt a weight in his stomach, a funny grief. Mima wouldn’t let her garden get like this, even in dead of winter. Mima was gone.

The smell from the greenhouse was pungent now, familiar and earthy to both Tim’s set of memories and he glanced across at Raylan. “We don’t tell them we’re Marshals,” he warned.

“You remember them growing weed?” Raylan asked quietly, urgently.

Tim stared at him, “right this second I remember playing with the new kid. Digging for earth worms,” he shrugged. “Guess we know why this place isn’t on the map.”

“We shouldn’t have come,” Raylan said and Tim nodded, but it was too late now. They would have been seen approaching already.

The door opened before they reached it and the man who marched out held a rifle across his body, not pointed at them but not more than a half second from being so. “Who in the _fuck_?!” he snarled at them. “This is god damned private god damned property! I can shoot you were you stand, you don’t fuckin’ leave!”

Raylan held both hands up and out, palms empty, white from the cold, “sir!” he said with a winning smile. “We’re lost.”

A gun shot rang out and Tim ducked, dragged Raylan with him and glanced around for the source, felt his gaze drawn towards the green house, both their hands moving for their side arms but no second shot came. He spared a glance for the man on the porch, who had brought his rifle barrels level with Raylan’s face and held it there steadily.

“Damn it!” a voice from inside the house echoed and a new figure emerged, shoved the first one aside. “DON’T FIRE YOUR GUN, DUMB ASS.” the voice bellowed, enough to be heard way back at the green house. “Stop that bullshit and get your ass up here.”

The figure turned on them. He was tall like Raylan, stockier in his build and his long hair was tied back in a pony tail, his beard and his hair grown wiry and grey in the fifty or sixty some years he’d lived. His eyes were hard, flinty grey that contrasted with the flowing hair and the loose clothes that made him look like a retired hippy. Even more black and white to his appearance was the mean looking rifle he himself clutched in one hand.

“Who in the fuck?” the new man asked them and Tim felt a name burble to the top of his mind. Jack. “Hands up where we can see them…you carrying?!”

This man was Jack. Jack had a deeper voice than you expected from his slender frame and he looked mean, sullen as he glowered at the two strangers.

“Only out of a healthy sense of self preservation, sir, we’re first amendment supporters too,” Raylan said quickly.

“I’d prefer if you’d toss them down,” Jack said firmly and Raylan winced.

“We’d prefer otherwise. But we wont draw,” Raylan promised and Jack glared at him.

“You sneeze and your hand moves wrong I’m aerating your sternum,” Jack said, though he carried no obvious weapon.

“Interestin’ way to welcome strangers,” Tim said lightly, unable to resist a dig but Raylan standing beside him used a fake laugh to dig an elbow into his side.

“No harm done, though” Raylan was feigning friendly sincerity like a champ though Tim could hear the tense thread in his voice, see the taught set to his shoulders. “We’re strangers, you got a right to defend yourself. Problem is, we’re lost. We heard there was some bar up here full of mountain girls with loose morals,” he flashed one of those aww shucks, I’m just one of the guys smiles that so often worked so well.

“Fuckin’ don’t care,” the man Tim knew was called Jack told them. “Fuck off.”

“We’d love to, truly.” Raylan said. “We’re trying real hard to fuck off over here, but we can’t find a way back to a road, less we know where we are to start with.”

“Not my problem,” Jack said with a shrug. “Get the fuck of my land.”

It wasn’t his land, Tim knew. It wasn’t. “We don’t want to make it your problem but our next option is we call for help. Mountain rescue, police,” Raylan said in an on so reasonable tone of voice, “I know you folks are private up here but they send choppers if we’re this lost,” Raylan said.

Tim was watching a figure approach and he wanted to focus on Jack but his eyes were drawn to the side of the house, the man coming from the greenhouse.

He was taller than Raylan, leaner too and the years hadn’t changed his face much from the picture now forming in Tim’s head. He still had blue eyes that were set deep in his head, a pinched little nose made him look like an upright skeleton. Tim felt a fear that was at once familiar and alien. It was like seeing your old monster from under the bed, one you had temporarily forgotten to be afraid of.

“Fuck is this?” Seth was asking, and Tim knew he was Seth and knew he was right to be afraid when he saw the winding scars on the mans uncovered arms, as if the cold didn’t matter to him. As a kid he thought the scars were snakes. Tim thought of his dreams, of the thing in the dark he feared so much.

It was this man. It was Seth.


	23. Chapter 23

As a child Tim would move when Seth came over, stand behind the biggest person so Seth couldn’t stare at him like he did.

As a man he had no such option. Seth was staring at him and Tim had to let him and he didn’t like it at all.

“I know you?” Seth asked mildly and Tim knew his face didn’t change when he shook his head.

“Don’t think so,” he said lightly.

“We really want to get out of your hair soon as we can, we can see we’re not welcome, we just need directions,” Raylan said. “I got the map with me…if you can show us where to go.”

“I know you,” Seth said as if Raylan hadn’t spoken and this time it was a statement, not a question. “I know him,” he turned to Jack, pointing at Tim and smiling. “Shit man…don’t he look like Foster?”

Jack turned and squinted at Tim and the look on his face was hard to read. “What’s that matter?” he snarled the question at Seth, who chuckled.

“That’s uncanny,” Seth laughed, “that’s weird.”

“If I can just,” Raylan spoke again. “Fellas,” there was a faint thread of urgency in his voice now. This was all wrong and Tim was starting to detect an acrid chemical smell on the air. The weed filled green house wasn’t all they were doing on this farm. “We need to leave.”

“I know you do. So git,” Jack said.

“We want to. We don’t know where to go,” Raylan said slowly, fighting to keep a lid on his temper. The most frustrating thing was he wasn’t entirely lying. They were lost, they did need to get away, and like it or not, these men were the only ones who could help.

“Where’d you come from?” Jack asked and something about how he said it made Tim speak.

“We don’t know for sure. We’re lost, can’t really tell you. We could show you, “As he spoke, the wind turned, picked up and threw the snow in Tim and Raylan’s faces and with it came the smell; the earthy pungent weed that was almost nice if you knew what good cannabis could smell like. And behind that was what Tim had feared.

The harsh chemical smell of cooking meth was unmistakable and strong enough that Raylan coughed involuntarily as it hit the back of his throat. Tim watched their hosts watch Raylan, saw Jack roll his eyes. He didn’t look guilty, or sad. He looked inconvenienced. They were a long way from safety. “Shhiit,” Jack sighed. “I didn’t need this today.” He shrugged and cast a look at the third man Tim didn’t recognise and the barrel swung towards them.

“Wait,” Tim said but he wasn’t the only one speaking.

“Wait!” Seth barked and he walked forwards, between the rifle and the Marshals he didn’t know were Marshals and he stared fiery death at Jack. He walked over to Tim and once again Tim fought an urge to back the fuck up as if from a deadly snake but being near Seth made every nerve in his body rattle. For a moment, Tim thought Seth might say his name, his real name, might call a halt to what had become, with a suddenness, an execution.

Raylan moved as if he’d speak but Tim touched the back of his hand to stop him.

“What?” Jack was glaring at Seth.

Seth paused a moment and Tim held his breath. “You’ll make a mess up here,” Seth sniffed. “If they bleed in the snow it’ll be here all winter long.”


	24. Chapter 24

It was colder down by the creek than anywhere else. Though the snow fell heavy the creek ran fat enough it hadn’t frozen over and it bubbled and trickled like Tim’s at home but thinking about that made Tim’s stomach turn. Their guns were gone and the man from the porch and a fourth guy that had remained in back of the house had been dispatched to find whatever car Raylan and Tim had arrived in.

“This is an overreaction,” Raylan was saying as they were walked towards the furthest end of the yard, towards a double wide trailer that served as a meth lab. “We just need directions,” he was dawdling, walking slow to try and buy time. “Sir, we’re not here to interfere with your business.”

“Shut up, walk,” Jack said.

Tim licked his lips and thought fast and hard. He did have another gun but it was under the heavy coat he wore against the cold and he couldn’t get to it easily. He could, however, reach his knife in his boot.

He needed to buy time and the creek was already too close.

“Seth, you recognise me because you know me,” Tim said quickly. “You do, think about it. You know me. I remember you,” he said it out loud and felt Raylan turn to glance at him, felt the air change.

“Fuck you talking about?” Seth said, but Jack was suddenly behind Tim, turned him quickly and swung the back of a muscular hand into Tim’s cheek and jaw.

Tim tried to fall, to go for the knife in his boot but Jack still held his jacket and dragged him back upright, shoved him towards the creek. “Move!”

“You know me,” Tim snarled at Seth, who was frowning, moving closer but Jack moved in again and grabbed Tim’s throat in that meaty hand and squeezed. “You don’t want to let him kill me,”

Jack started dragging and Tim stumbled off his feet, the cold starting to bite in but he grabbed Jack’s wrist, found a nerve and dug his fingers in and the hand popped open and Tim tried to back up but Jack swung the butt of Tim’s own gun and cracked it across Tim’s temple.

Tim fell for real, didn’t have to try but his ears rang and the world swam around him and he couldn’t figure out what he’d been trying to do.

“Jack,” Tim heard Seth say as Jack hauled him back to his feet again and shoved him towards the creek, but Tim stumbled, legs unsteady.

“You’re trespassin’ on my land,” Jack snapped, shoving him again and Tim fell hard into the snow, knee jamming into a rock hidden beneath and sending a cramp of pain through his leg.

“It’s not your land,” Tim hissed and there was a moment of quiet, a holding of breath, “It’s Foster’s.”

The silence stretched on and broke, “Foster’s dead,” Jack shrugged.

 Jack grabbed Tim around the neck and hauled again but the muscles in Tim’s leg seized and he couldn’t get the weight under him the right way, couldn’t stand and Jack wouldn’t let him fall. He choked under Jack’s hand, felt pressure build quickly behind his eyes and his air cut off.

“Who are you?” Seth was asking uncertainly. “Jack, who is he? How’s he know Foster? He looks like him, Jack!”

“He’s fuckin’ with you! Help me, damn it!” Jack snarled. “God fuckin’ damn you.” He hauled Tim again and Tim gagged, choked, clawed at Jack’s hand. “You, move!” Jack snarled at Raylan.

Seth ran and shoved Raylan hard enough that Raylan tumbled to the ground but he kept crawling backwards like Jack was ordering. Tim’s leg still wasn’t cooperating and he couldn’t get it under him but Jack still hauled him towards the creek, cursing him as he dragged.

Tim fought for air but couldn’t find it, could just feel the tightness around his throat and Jack’s nails biting into the skin. He could hear the faint trickle of water beneath a thin layer of ice and he knew death was approaching. Jack had to use both hands to grab him, to haul him the last few feet and Tim tried to fight but the strength had left him.

His head plunged into icy cold water and he found solid something beneath his hands, cold wet rock beneath the water and he pushed up and felt a gun barrel at the back of his skull. He heard Raylan cry out, maybe ‘no’ maybe something else and everything slowed and became quiet. Tim realised no hand was around his throat.

“I’m Cody Wolff,” Tim choked out and he heard Seth shout.

No bullet came, no booming gun shot that would tear Tim’s brain out through his nasal cavity. Another silence bloomed and grew, stretched long and snapped and all the sound came back at once.

“What’d you say?” Seth asked.

“I’m Cody Wolff. I’m Leia’s boy,” Tim said, violent tremors hitting him from his soaked hair and clothes.

Behind him, he heard Jack speak, voice uncertain for the first time since he appeared;  “that’s not possible.”

Tim turned then and he raised his hands and turned the gun out of Jack’s grip. It was like fitting into old clothes, the gun slid home in his hands and he found the trigger and squeezed.

Jack’s skull blew out backwards and he toppled after it and Tim brought the gun around on Seth and levelled it at him.

Seth had Raylan’s gun raised, locked on Raylan who was still sprawled and prone in the snow, helpless to save himself.

Seth squinted at him, angry and confused, eyes burning. “Who are you?” he demanded. “Cody’s fuckin’ dead, man.  That dumb slut lost him in the woods.”

“US Marshals, drop the gun,” Tim didn’t move, didn’t react to Seth’s words, eyes locked on his target, breathing slow and level and he waited.

Seth looked at him, glanced to Raylan then to Jack. Tim saw the glaze to his eyes, wondered how much of the product he’d been sampling and that meant for his rational decision making skills.

Tim waited as Seth stared at him. “You’re not Cody,” he said again, uncertain of his own words. There was something strange in his tone, a fondness. “Cody’s dead…that’s what Foster said. Cody’s dead.”

“Drop your weapon,” Tim ordered. “Make the right decision, Seth.”

Seth stared at him again and his baffled frown twisted into a smile that made Tim’s stomach roll with nausea. “I knew I knew you,” Seth smiled as if at an old, half remembered joke.

“Drop the gun, you got one last chance. Make the right decision, Seth.”

Seth made the wrong decision. He swung his gun up and at Tim, thinking he’d be fast enough and wrong in his assumption.

Tim squeezed once and the bullet took Seth in the shoulder and he was spun around, Raylan’s gun flying free of his hand and spinning off into the snow, glittering in the white spot lights.

Seth fell, howling and Tim let out a breath that felt like the biggest one he’d ever held.

“Tim,” Raylan started to say but Tim was hit by something and heartbeat later he heard the ring crack of a gun shot. He tumbled backwards, strength and tension leaving his body as pain, white hot agony, burned through him from somewhere on his side.

“TIM,” Raylan’s voice boomed as Tim fell into the thinner snow near the creek edge and felt any trace of heat he’d had left drain from him, stared up at the cloudy sky and the snow flakes falling into his eyes and he felt the heat of his blood against his winter cooled skin. He was shot. He was bleeding. Tim took a breath and it hurt. He was so tired, for once. At last. He stared at the sky and thought he should be doing something, worrying about something. Overhead the heavy clouds bore down and the snow fell thicker, the flakes like falling feathers. Tim wished it was clear. He wished he could see the stars. He closed his eyes and hoped at last he might be able to sleep.


	25. Chapter 25

Art Mullen’s rubbed his temple and tried to work out the headache he got from hospital lights and sterile air conditioning.

It had been four days since Tim was flown out of the mountains, dangerously low on blood but so cold it might have saved his life, flown all the way back to Lexington as soon as he was stable. Art had insisted. Too much bad had happened to the boy when he was away and Art wanted him home.

Raylan and Rachel had followed a few days later. They had stuck around to finish the case, to answer the questions they had nearly lost so much in asking. Now they knew and Art was about to. Tim didn’t yet. He wasn’t ready. He was going to be okay but was still in that part of recovering where the body fell into a harmless but deep and stubborn sleep that the doctors even encouraged. The less energy he burned being awake, the more his body reparing. No one wanted to rouse him before he was ready.

The woman sitting with them was Art’s age at least, slender even beneath a warm coat, auburn hair running to grey tied back in a braid. She seemed more shocked than tired, her eyes bright, just confused. She hadn’t been told much. She would only let them call her Mrs Decker and, to no great surprise, had kept any other details of her identity a secret. She had come along somewhat reluctantly, told it was related to the shooting of a Marshal on what turned out to be a quiet but industrious operation that grew weed and cooked meth, dealing primarily to bikers but occasionally to friends they trusted. That was what Rachel and Raylan had gleaned before she clammed up at the suggestion she leave with them. She wasn’t entirely there by choice, not entirely in custody either. But she was there.

“Ma’am,” Art spoke into the quiet of the room. Thought it wasn’t officially private, they were alone.

“Why am I here? I haven’t dealt with those assholes on that hill in years,” she said, her voice quiet but strong beneath, like a woman used to controlling a room who just trying to find her feet. Once she had her bearings, she’d be hell to deal with.

“I’m sure you haven’t,” Art said and they all chose not to comment on the fact she had been grinding weed to mix into butter when Raylan and Rachel arrived at the only house matching the address for Leia Wolff. “We have a….a mess, on our hands, ma’am,” Art said, “A complicated one.”

He spoke slowly, hoping his words would line up nicely for him if he gave himself time. “I got a boy through there,” he waved to Tim’s room. “He’s a Marshal now. He was a soldier before that, a n especially good one. He was killing Taliban when other kids his age were worrying about getting laid at dorm mixers. I never saw somebody who can shoot like he can, not ever. Never saw a Marshal run down a man down like he can.” Art meant every word.

“He have a reason to be on private land?” Mrs Decker asked in that quiet, strong voice.

Art ignored the question. “Some months ago, that boys mother died. They weren’t close. He was more rattled than he cared to admit but I figure he’d have been alright, if things had just carried on but they didn’t carry on. His mom turned out to have a history,” Art took a breath and thought of the accounts he had read from Raylan and Tim about what had happened, and almost happened in a dark little room in Texas. He had been in Tim’s hospital room one night after, when the young man had woken gasping from a heavy sleep. He had not mentioned it. Neither had Art. “She was named Lucy,” Art said and Mrs Decker looked up at him, her eyes flickering as she tried to pretend she wasn’t reacting.

But Art watched her. “You know that name?” he asked and she looked away from him.

“Ma’am,” Art said gently. “We probably know more than you think. But I’ll be the first to know we’ve been piecing this together like a puzzle we only got half the pieces to. We know about Lucy. We know about Tim,” he watched her, saw her hold her breath for a second. “We know about Cody.”

She let the breath out, but she didn’t turn yet to look at Tim, visible through a window into the room. “What do you know?”

“We’d like you to tell us what happened,” Art said. “Are you Leia?”

“It was Seth,” Mrs Deckard spoke as if she hadn’t heard him, as if the decision to speak had come suddenly and couldn’t be stopped. “He never got at Cody but he wanted to. He wanted to,” she sounded disgusted and looked up to see if Art understood.” You know what I mean?”

“He was a paedophile?” Art asked and Mrs Deckard grimaced again.

“He was disgusting. We would tell Foster, Seth is sniffing around Cody…he’s after him, but Seth grew the weed, he cooked. He wasn’t going anywhere. Foster would talk to him, scare him off the kid but Seth would just wait a few months then start trying again. He would try and be Cody’s friend but Cody was,” tears filled her eyes as she remembered. “He was so smart. He knew Seth was trouble. He was afraid, he’d stay away, run away. No one knew the woods better than him,” she coughed, cleared her throat, fought back the tears. “They came, friends of Jack, I think, this couple. And they brought her Lucy, and her kid, Timmy. He was so sweet. A friend for Cody, a good little boy, a nice little boy. Lucy adored him. She fell in love with Cody, too. She was a good mom,” Mrs Deckard half smiled again at the memories flooding back. “She would take care of the boys all the time never had to be asked, playing with them, reading with them, walking with them in the woods. She really liked it up there, I think. She would have stayed. But…she came across Seth. They were up at the farm one day and he was there and creepy and she read him like a book. She got the boys away from him, told anyone who would listen about him. But she was just stonewalled. Just ignored.” She stopped then, hesitated as if unsure she should keep going.

“Mrs Deckard,” Rachel asked, her voice gentle and soft, supportive but urging, “what did Lucy do?”

Mrs Deckard wrung her hands. “She tried to tell everyone. She said Seth would get at Cody one day, that if Seth couldn’t go, Cody had to. She couldn’t believe people just ignored it and after a while, she started to get…mean about it. I don’t blame her, no one thought she was wrong but she got personal and I think it turned folk on her. People are fickle. She called someone a fatass, that was enough. It’s not okay. It’s not okay. She wanted to save him,” Mrs Deckard sniffed again, holding back more tears. “ There was this one night…she’d had a couple drinks, or a lot and she was asking ‘Is Cody his reward? Is that it? Is Cody his payment’, That upset Foster. Jack spoke to the other two but they sided with Lucy, they thought it was fucked up. That was it. They got told to go and never come back and they went in a second. Just packed up and bailed. A few days later…we lost Cody. It was too close to be a coincidence. Cody wouldn’t get lost…they thought it was Seth, they did. His little trailer got torn up, Foster was ready to kill him but there was no sign…we knew. We knew it was Lucy… It wasn’t like they could tell the cops. And Foster,” she paused, took a deep and angry breath. “He said ‘He’ll be safer. This way…Seth wont get him’” she shook her head again, looked ready to spit. She looked at Art, waiting.

Art took a long, deep breath and thought on her words. His puzzle made sense now. He decided he’d feel things about it later. Right now he wanted to break something, but that wouldn’t be productive. Beside him, Raylan rose out of his chair quickly, letting out a breath that was so like a hiss a primitive part of Art shuddered. Raylan moved like he was angry, pacing a little ways and stopping to stare at nothing and bring himself back down. Art could see the tension writ through the man. He turned to Rachel, who had gone cold and blank as she tried to process the logic of it. Tim or Cody, seemed cursed by the universe.

Art tried to borrow some of Rachel’s resolve, locking himself down. It was his turn now.   “We found out, when Lucy died, that thirty years ago she was the sole adult survivor of a multiple murder in Texas. The couple you mentioned and a friend of theirs were gunned down by bikers over a stolen bag of money. One child died in the shooting. Lucy and a second child survived, though how isn’t clear. We think Lucy was out of the room and the kid just got lucky,” Art said.

“Lucy drove the surviving child back to her husbands house and left him there. She left the same day and she barely saw a day of the kid after that. His father hadn’t seen him since he was a few weeks old. He…dragged that kid up…Tim Gutterson. The only life and name he’s ever known,” Art said carefully, quietly. Sometimes in his worst moments he wished he didn’t know about the lives his Marshals had led, the grief they had endured and survived. It made him angry at things he couldn’t fix. “It wasn’t a good life.  His father was a piece of shit,” Art said firmly. He’d gotten to take a few verbal runs at Arlo Givens on behalf of Raylan but Tim’s dad died before he turned nineteen. Art would never get to work out his feelings on the mans face.

He paused, unsure of how to explain the next part. He reached for the photos a doctor had given him, that had been folded inside Tim’s damaged, bloodstained coat.

He passed Mrs Deckard the polaroid of Cody and she made a noise like a laugh that became a sob as she gazed at the little boy. “He wrote this,” she stroked the childish script on the picture. “He was so proud,” she smiled.

 Art handed her the photo of Tim’s, which Raylan had explained to him. She frowned again, deeper now. “This is Cody,” she said. “older than…” she trailed off and looked at the second photo, examining it as if for clues it was real. “This is Cody,” she said, her voice gone hard and dull as if inside herself she had retreated from all emotion, too afraid to let these flow, in case it was wrong. “This is Cody,” she stated, more certain with the repetition. She looked up at him. She knew, he could tell. But she needed him to say it.

Art looked at her. “Timothy Gutterson, the little boy who Lucy brought to your farm, died in that motel room thirty years ago. The surviving child she left with her husband, who is the man in that hospital room behind you is Cody Wolff.”

Mrs Deckard gasped and sobbed, folding at the waist and burying her face in her hands. Her body shook as she cried and her sobs were muffled by her bundled scarf and skirts. She sat up, her face streaked with tears, turning as if she would be able to see Tim, Cody, through the wall behind her. “Oh my God! Oh my God! Can I see him? Please, can I see him?!” she started to rise but Art held out a hand, signalled her to sit.

“He’s resting,” he said. “He’s resting, Mrs Deckard,” but she couldn’t hear him. She didn’t move for the room but she was unsure what to do, half pacing, shaking her head. “Leia!” he said firmly.

She stopped then, turned to look at him, her eyes wide,  and her face fell from joy to something else as a different understanding hit her. “Oh,” she said, shaking her head, “Oh no.”


	26. Chapter 26

Raylan was sitting beside Tim’s bed nursing a coffee that tasted somewhere between tar and older tar, wondering what the kids record was for not reacting to anything, at all. There hadn’t been much discussion when Tim woke up. Raylan was telling him. Tim was listening, Raylan knew, but he wasn’t sure how he’d prove that in a court of law.

 Maybe it was the pain killers he was on, but Raylan suspected it was just Tim. Either way, something had passed from him, part of the bad thing that had been eating at him. He had regained some control over himself and he had locked down completely. Since he woke up there had been a few wry, dry, Tim like jokes but Raylan had known it was a show for Art and Rachel who had been around when he first stirred.

They had gone off now, on a long, winding journey to the ground floor and franchised coffee place to stock up on refreshments, give them both time to call people who would be missing them and check in. It was to give Raylan time.

He wasn’t ready to call Winona yet, though he’d texted her. She would wait for him. Way back when they’d fallen apart because he couldn’t open up and she wanted him to, so she could help him. They had found a balance now, he opened up but in his own time. She had texted back love and sweetness, pictures and videos of Willa to cheer him up. She told him to show one to Tim, Willa dressed as a character from her favourite story book, one Tim had sent as a gift when she was born. Tim had seen it already and smiled big and wide for at least ten seconds.  

Now, Tim looked tired in the way people do when they have blood loss and powerful painkillers to cope with but he wasn’t ready to stop learning. It had been slow going so far and he was taking it all in stony silence, the only way he knew how to deal with anything. He knew about Seth, and that Foster wouldn’t move the guy on to protect little Cody. He knew Lucy had fought to protect him, taken him thinking she was saving him. He knew Foster had called off any search, rationalised Cody would be away from the predatory Seth, so safer. He had said nothing. If Raylan didn’t see the machinery reading out his stats, he wouldn’t be sure Tim was even breathing.

He knew Leia had tried to search as quietly as she could, unable to contact any authorities so travelling by herself to California with the only other pictures she had of Cody, polaroids from the same night he wrote his name on his picture. She had known Jack met the coyote couple in California and little else so she had focussed on the south, hoping someone might have seen her boy. He knew what had happened then.

“You were six,” Raylan spoke into the quiet that had grown after he said the words. “She was on her way back from her last trip to California and a tyre blew out. She controlled it for a while, according to witnesses in other cars, but the car came off the road into a ditch. It was head on. Instantaneous. She didn’t suffer.”

Mrs Deckard was a friend of Leia’s. Tim had known that before they discussed anything else. To wait would be cruel. She had remembered the little boy named Cody and it was clear she had loved him dearly, taken his loss on as her own when his mother died and carried his story forwards. Formally, she was his legal guardian. Leia had set it up before she died, afraid she would pass before her son came home. She had been right. When Tim was ready Raylan would tell him he owned the farm where he had been born, a picturesque and beautiful place that Raylan hoped Tim wanted to see. Mrs Deckard, Annie, had been living there since Leia died, waiting for Cody.

Tim was silent, staring at nothing. The door opened and they both looked, wide eyed and alert, even with Tim full of opiates. Raylan saw a familiar looming figure, glanced back at Tim in time to see the younger Marshals face crumple and eyes fill as the control he’d gained broke and grief flowed over him.

Raylan moved deftly out of Charlie Maku’s way as the tall man crossed the room in two steps and reached the bed. Raylan heard Tim cough and heard the quiet words in a voice that was cracked and broken, “she’s dead, my moms dead” before Charlie’s body folded around his and Raylan reached the door, stepping out and pulling it closed behind him.


End file.
